Boris has his work cut out if he wants Britain to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050
When Boris Johnson laid out his ten point plan for the UK’s “Green Industrial Revolution” yesterday, its most eye-catching policy was the proposal to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030. The ban had been on the cards for 2040 but has now been brought forward by a decade. A report by the Climate Change Committee saying that the UK had to switch-over to electric vehicles by 2032 in order to meet its target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 perhaps played a role in informing this change of policy. However, experts have also warned that making the transition will not be easy.
The move will greatly reduce the UK’s transport emissions. Government estimates found that the transport sector accounted for 34% of all of the UK’s CO2 emissions in 2019. Cars do seem to make up the majority of these emissions. Research by the European Parliament found that cars produced 60.7% of all transport emissions in European Union and light duty trucks made up another 11.9%.
To aid the shift away from diesel and petrol, the government plans to make available over £2 billion in funds. This includes £1.3 billion for installing electric vehicle chargepoints across the country, £582 million in grants to support people purchasing zero or ultra-low emission vehicles, and roughly £500 million to support development and mass production of electric vehicle batteries.
The amount of money being made available indicates the sheer scale of the challenge. The number of electric vehicles being sold has risen sharply in recent years. Data on new car registrations from The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders shows that sales of battery electric vehicles were up 56.6% in October this year as compared to October 2019, even as overall sales were down by 1.6%. Yet despite this boom, battery electric vehicles still only made up 6.6% of new cars being registered.
According to Professor Peter Wells, Director of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff Business School, one of the biggest challenges will be making electric cars convenient for consumers: “You will need a whole new ecosystem of mechanics trained to deal with electric vehicles. How will emergency servicing work?” He added: “Lack of common standards for charge points – how much does it cost, what services are on offer? Etc. – is a major problem. People need to be able to use them without thinking.”
Furthermore, even if these services are made more user friendly a huge effort will have to be made to help people access these services. Department of Transport statistics show that the UK only has 19,487 public electric vehicle charging points, and only 3,530 rapid charging points. Given that electric cars can take anywhere from 16 hours to 30 minutes to charge – depending on the type of car and charging point – the UK will need tens if not hundreds of thousands more charging points installed in people’s drives, on the street, and in service stations.
Nor are these charge points evenly distributed. London has by far the most with 63 charge points for every 100,000 inhabitants, almost three times more than Northern Ireland and Yorkshire. The government will have to put in a major effort to ensure owning an electric car becomes a viable option across the country.
Promises to use electric vehicle production as a way to revitalise manufacturing areas in the North and Midlands may also prove hard to fulfil. Supply chain issues, in particular battery production, should hopefully be resolved by 2030 according to Professor Wells. However, there is no guarantee that production will be concentrated in the UK.
Professor Wells observed: “Currently there’s a huge amount investment across Europe to boost electric car supply chains. But, these investments aren’t being made in the UK. Honda pulled out of its Swindon plant in part because it could see where the market was going and it would have had to import its batteries from Japan. The local plant just wasn’t big enough to warrant its own battery production facilities. Meanwhile, Jaguar Land Rover has been slow to electrify – and might just not have the resources.”
There is no denying that the commitment laid out by Boris Johnson yesterday was an ambitious, even optimistic goal. However, as is typical with this government, optimistic goals don’t necessarily seem to have been paired with a clear overview of how they will be reached. The devil will be in the detail and with the government’s white paper on energy, which was scheduled for summer 2019, still delayed, we may yet be waiting some time for these vital details to be released.