APPG 2030 Ban

Fair Fuel APPG for UK Motorists and UK Hauliers August 2021 Page | 21 Banning the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) – The Figures simply do not add up! Reducing UK’s dependency on petrol and diesel by 75% will be catastrophic both practically and economically. And will not deliver net zero any quicker. The National Grid says it is confident that it is 'suitably robust to cope with the forecast uptake in electric vehicles' from 2030. On all available evidence, the public are being ‘sold a pup’. The cliff edge ban on diesel and petrol new vehicle sales announcement has sent alarm bells ringing about the resulting huge rise in demand on the electricity grid in the run-up to 2030 and beyond, as more motorists are forced to switch to plug-in cars. A wide scale move to renewable energy has yet to be achieved and the introduction of 'smart grids' to retain energy and increase electricity supplies when called upon remains in its infancy. This will raise serious concerns about the network's ability to cope when thousands of vehicle owners plug their cars in to charge at the same time, which will be a common occurrence overnight. UK's power generation and energy storage capacity are woefully inadequate, relative to the EV charging demands proposed to be placed on it. Commenting in Local Transport Today in June 2020, Prof Kelly said: "C onsider Dinorwig power station (pictured), the biggest hydropower energy storage plant in the UK. If all UK cars were battery powered, the nine gigawatts of energy stored behind the dam would be capable of recharging about 60,000 of them, or about 0.25 per cent of the UK fleet.” ...If all vehicles have to be electric, “something of the order of 70 per cent of Britain’s entire existing electricity supply capacity will be needed” 5 . Compounding the problem, UK politicians are perhaps placing too much faith in the two least reliable renewable energy sources: wind and solar. These require conventional backup, capable of powering the entire UK when there is no wind or sunshine. So, the 'renewables' are essentially superfluous. The emissions they create in their manufacture, operation and maintenance are additional to the UK’s baseload power output, while actually delivering extraordinarily little power annually per UK household. With operating voltages about a tenth of the onshore grid, transmission losses are much higher. Likewise, solar is woefully inefficient, vast panel arrays being needed to deliver useful output. The panels again rely on exotic materials and highly energy-intensive extraction processes for their manufacture. Given their finite life, what are their disposal arrangements? So, is the Government sleep walking into a self- induced economic catastrophe, just to appease a fashionable environmental ideology? Paradoxically, this could easily make offshore wind, carbon positive!