Electric cars in Europe - a nutty idea

From Christopher Booker writing at the UK Telegraph:

Beware the wrong kind of Leafs on the road
Listeners to last Tuesday�s Today programme might have been baffled by a strange little item presented by Evan Davis, which seemed to be yet another of the BBC�s regular puffs for those supposedly planet-saving electric cars. Apart from the pleasure of hearing Mr Davis repeatedly tell us, as he was driven around in one of these vehicles, how �comfortable� it was and how �smoothly� it drove, one wondered what was the occasion for this item � unless it was somehow connected with the recent visit by David Cameron to the Nissan car plant in Sunderland, to acclaim these �cars of the future� as he celebrated the launch of the first all-electric Leaf made in Europe. Nissan hopes to sell these vehicles to British drivers at �24,460 a time, plus a �5,000 subsidy from us taxpayers.

What would never have been guessed from either Mr Davis or the Prime Minister was that lurking behind all this is a huge story, involving one of the most dottily fanciful schemes even the EU has ever put its hand to. We are all familiar with what makes this obsession with electric cars so curious. For up to �30,000 or more you get a battery-operated vehicle which, if driven quite slowly with the lights and heating off, can travel up to 100 miles before its battery needs several hours of recharging. Two years ago, after the BBC broadcast yet another of its propaganda puffs � showing how it had taken four days to drive an electric car from London to Edinburgh, involving recharging stops of up to 10 hours � I noted that in the 1830s, a stagecoach could do the same journey in half the time.

Considering that their lithium batteries need replacing every few years at a further cost of up to �20,000, it is hardly surprising that last year, only 1,262 new all-electric cars were registered in Britain, despite the �400 million the Government has put aside in subsidies. As for their supposed saving on CO2 emissions, what too often gets left out of the picture is that almost all the electricity used to charge those batteries comes from fossil fuels, so that, once transmission losses to the charging points are factored in, savings on CO2 emissions can easily be zero.

And one reason that the EU government is so hot on the idea?

So why are the Government and the BBC so keen on these absurd vehicles? The answer, astonishingly enough, can be dug out from a sheaf of EU documents showing that one of the chief reasons why it and the European Investment Bank are pouring five billion euros into research and development of electric vehicle technology, is the fond belief that this can provide a miraculous solution to one of the major drawbacks of that other obsession of the EU, the need for Europe to generate ever more of its electricity from those equally useless and ludicrously expensive wind turbines.

A major problem with wind energy, of course, is that the wind blows so intermittently, and often at times when demand is lowest, that the windmills pile up large amounts of what is called �wrong time� electricity, which cannot be stored until demand rises again. So enter those electric cars, and the concept known as �V2G� or �vehicle to grid�. The idea is that, if millions of electric vehicles can be sold, not only can their batteries be charged during the 95 per cent of the time they are on average off the road, absorbing much of that surplus wind energy at night, they can also be used, by way of �smart meters�, to reverse the flow, providing back-up for the windmills by feeding power back into the grid when needed.

Quite how commuters will react when they want to drive their car to work, only to find that its battery has been drained to meet the morning surge in demand, is not explained. Everything about this mammoth project recalls Swift�s Academy of Lagado, and Gulliver�s meeting with the man who wanted a hefty subsidy for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. But an equal mystery is how much of all this Mr Cameron was aware of when he flew up to Sunderland the other day to acclaim these �cars of the future�. Not, I suspect, very much.

Absolutely unreal -- more here (with lots of additional links to sources) and here. A perfect example of out-of-touch cultural 'elites' trying to manage a real-world issue and falling short.