Electric dreams

Electric cars have been around for ages, and were competing quite successfully with petrol-driven versions in the 1920s, until cheap oil was discovered in Texas, and Henry Ford got busy mass-producing fossil fuel driven vehicles.

Well, maybe the age of the electric car has finally come. Apparently the government will announce in next week's budget money for those wanting to switch to electric cars - up to £5000 towards the cost of a new electric motor. Finally, a few things seem to be coming together - improved batteries which provide enough power between charges to cover most journeys, a car industry casting around for new money-making ideas in a recession, and a range of pretty mainstream electric car designs. So, is this it for the petrol-driven car?

The basic idea behind electric cars as an environmentally-beneficial measure is that they aren't inherently reliant on greenhouse gas producing fossil fuels. Alternative fuels, like hydrogen, have always been a bit of a non-starter, due to the cost of building an entirely new distribution network to pump them around the country. Electricity, on the other hand, is already distributed around the country, so adding a bit of infrastructure to get it into cars isn't such a big job. Have a fleet of electric cars, the thinking goes, and you've just freed the transport fleet from the shackles of fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, as you might have spotted, there's a flaw in the plan which stops electric cars from being the green panacea we might wish for. If all the electricity which is charging the cars is being generated from clean renewable sources like offshore wind, that's all well and good. But Britain's current electricity mix - with about 40 per cent of our electricity coming from coal power - means that while charging an electric car using electricity generated from a fossil-fuel mix will produce less emissions than running a car on petrol, it isn't really capitalising on the green potential of the technology.

Financial incentives to get people shifting over to electric cars are a good move, but they're only one part of what it's going to take to shift our transport infrastructure over to a clean one. To do that, we're going to need to do a few other things:

First, we're going to have to stop building fossil-fuel power plants. Going to all the trouble of shifting everyone over to electric cars if they're going to be charged up by a new Kingsnorth coal power station is a colossal waste of time. If we want electric cars to reduce emissions to their full potential, we need to decarbonise our electricity supply.

Secondly we can't just treat electric cars as a silver-bullet techno-fix for our wasteful transport ways. We're going to need to change some things about the way we use cars, like the fact that the average occupancy for a car journey is around 1.6 people. (And less for commuter journeys - it's around 1.2). When cars are that empty, they're always going to use energy badly.

Sure, that means we need to encourage people to share car journeys, but mainly it means we need some serious upgrading of public transport in the UK, to deliver a system that can actually get you where you want to be faster than you could get there by car. That's not an impossible dream - the more public transport gets used, the less congestion there is, and the more journey times as a whole drop. Of course, there are always going to be journeys that it's difficult to do without a car, but if public transport was a priority for the government, for most people commuting to work needn't be one of them.

Thirdly, it's probably worth noting that the oil companies aren't going to give up on the petrol-powered car without a fight, given that they make literally trillions of dollars selling petrol to drivers. They'll use whatever underhand or brute force tactics they can to slow or hinder the take-up of electric cars. That means government will have to be committed to making the change happen - and that means more than the money to be pledged in the budget, which we worked out would only put 26,000 electric cars on the road (in March 2009 there were 314,000 new cars registered in the UK). But given that plenty of petrol cars will continue to be sold, it also means that they need to get tough with the motor industry on fuel efficiency standards and put in some binding legislation to get motor manufacturers to reduce the miles-per-gallon on their petrol vehicles.

In other words, it's going to take some joined-up thinking, and a bit of political leadership, not just a quick bung. So, the jury is out. Will this be the first step in a well thought out plan to reduce emissions? Or is all this talk about electric cars and cash handouts just a green smokescreen to win a few votes at the next election? Let's wait and see, but if for example the government do give the go-ahead to Kingsnorth, we'll know.