IN JULY the Government announced a plan to spend another £700million of taxpayers’ money to encourage drivers to buy electric vehicles (EVs). However the take-up of EVs has failed to meet government targets.
Now it is reported that the rollout of roadside EV chargers has also fallen behind programme.
Ed Miliband’s ideology-driven targets are looking increasingly flaky. To recap:
1) Second-hand EV prices are now around £25,000, according to Cazoo data, down from £39,000 on average three years ago, which implies that buyers now face > £1,000 pa extra in depreciation.
2) Some insurers have increased premiums for EVs, due a perceived fire risk, while some ferry and car park owners have banned them.
3) Around 87,000 roadside chargers had been installed in the UK as at November 2025, That requires up to 90,000 new installations every year, which is ten times the installation rate since 2015.
4) At an average rating of 100kW, just 450,000 roadside chargers would add 45GW to prospective grid Maximum Demand (MD). Along with 10,000 heat pumps assuming up to 2kW each, 65kW would be added to prospective grid MD. (Note that unlike with domestic chargers, the roadside charging demand can’t be phased overnight.) To that must be added the loads of immersion heaters, new electric cookers, electric railways, 1.5million new houses, plus a few data centres.
5) But around 40GW of ageing nuclear and gas turbine generators are to retire by the early 30s, by which time the projected grid MD will exceed 80GW, often when there is negligible sun or wind. Sadly the lead time for ordering new back-up power is extending beyond five years and Mr Miliband seems to be leaving us with a grid which will be unfit for purpose.
6) It takes about three minutes, paying at the pump, to fill a petrol or diesel car for a 500-mile trip, compared with >1 hour for an EV. To charge an EV for 500 miles in five minutes requires a charger rating of around 3,000kW. There will never be many of those around.
7) The government will have to replace around £35billion a year in fuel tax from petrol and diesel vehicles at around £1,000 per vehicle in the form of a road tax. Additionally, roadside charging tariffs per kWh can be more than twice those at home and green levies will only drive them higher.
8) At the current mining rate, it will take more than 100 years to obtain the lithium needed to replace the world’s 1,500million cars and quite a few commercial vehicles.
MPs are supposed to inform themselves on such issues, to scrutinise government proposals and to ask searching questions. If they had been doing that and not abdicating to unelected and unaccountable quangos, they would be clamouring for a deferral of the totally unrealistic net zero targets.
EU countries have seen the light and have deferred a number of net zero targets from 2035 until 2040. Since the PM is so keen to align us with EU directives, why are he and Mr Miliband seemingly unable to grasp reality and abandon their kamikaze trip?
