The Blind Leading…?
An Important Decision
In mid-May 2022, the EU Commission decided to ban the sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035. This is an important decision. The transformation to electromobility will be necessary to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and secure the future of mobility in Europe.
Link to article the EU plans to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035
The problem is that this type of decision needs to be accompanied by a large-scale programme to build up the resources necessary to drive all cars on electricity by 2050 and to drive a large share of all cars on electricity already by 2035.
Achieving this will be a challenge for the most affluent countries like Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and France. But a ban of the sales of new petrol and diesel cars will also mean that countries with lower GDP per capita will have to change to electric cars and that all new cars sold in countries like Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Czech Republic will have to be electric as well. In order to facilitate the conversion to electric vehicles, each of these countries will need to embark on investment programmes of a scale and complexity that has not been foreseen by decision makers.
Blind Guardians of Ignorance
In 2020 my book “The Blind Guardians of Ignorance” was published. It describes how high-level decision makers have little knowledge of the facts related to electromobility. They seem to think that banning the sales of petrol and diesel vehicles will automatically initiate all the activities that will be needed to drive the transformation forward, but this will not be the case.
EU politicians and officials do not seem to understand that large fleets of electric cars will require large amounts of power. They also do not seem to understand that the expansion of power production and grids will have to start well ahead of the expansion of the fleets of electric cars, buses, and trucks. Systematic expansion activities really need to start NOW in order to facilitate the large-scale expansion of electric cars and fleets of transport vehicles, that are also expected to grow dramatically in the years to come. It takes more than ten years to plan large-scale expansion measures and build a large number of very large power plants. So up until 2035, countries will have to make do with the amounts of power that are already produced, plus smaller expansion measures that can be made based on the existing infrastructure.
The start of the transformation projects will inevitably start an avalanche of investment in charging infrastructure, power grids, power production and many other areas.
It is perhaps difficult to grasp big numbers, but high-level decision makers and administrators in the EU and in national governments and government agencies are the first that need to know some basics about the transformation. They have the resources to make analyses of the expansion that will be needed.
To drive all cars, buses, and trucks in Germany on electricity, 25% of the present power production will be needed. This, however, is what is needed in the summer. To charge all vehicles in the coldest weeks of the coldest winters in a 20-year period, which is what power production and grids are normally dimensioned to cover, maybe twice as much production capacity will be needed. To cover the charging of all vehicles in the UK, 30% of the present power production would be needed, and substantially more capacity will be needed in cold winters. Similar expansion needs exist for most other countries that will embrace electromobility. The figures are easily calculated, because each electric car needs about 2,000 kW of power. This mulitiplied by the number of cars in a country renders the number of TWh needed for all cars while driving in the summer — almost 100 TWh for Germany. The power need for buses and trucks is calculated as an additional 50% of the needed to charge cars. The total for Germany amounts to 150 TWh and at present 600 TWh are produced each year. In cold winters the capacity need doubles. In the spring, summer, and autumn 17 nuclear reactors, generating 9 TWh each every year, are needed to charge all cars on a regular basis, but in a cold winter week with -5 degrees C the range of an electric vehicle halves and twice as many reactors are needed to keep vehicles rolling. The number of wind turbines would be 225,000 in the summer and 450,000 in cold winter weeks.
Some of the electricity needed can be covered by present surplus production, but it is not clear how much fleets of electric vehicles can expand without significant investment in new capacity.
It is relatively easy to calculate the power need for an entire country or region, as this is based on the number of cars, buses, and trucks that are located in the area. An additional amount needs to be added for vehicles that come in from other countries or regions, but this amount is usually balanced by the need to charge cars in each region or nation as they travel to other areas.
What is more difficult is to estimate the need to expand power grids and charging infrastructure. There are national, regional, and local grids and in many places regional and local grids will need to expand to make sure that all cars, buses, and trucks that are parked over-night or during the day, can be charged with the amount of power they need to drive the next day or in the next few hours, regardless of where the vehicle may be or what amount of power it will need.
To expand vehicle fleets on a large scale to electric vehicles, charging infrastructure needs to expand so that all vehicles can be charged, whenever they need. In tens of thousands of places, where a large number of vehicles need to be charged, power grids will have to expand as well.
The fact that 100 fast chargers have been built in one parking house does not mean that 100 chargers can be build in all parking houses in a city, without expanding both power production and grid capacity. The types of vehicles that need really large amounts of power are heavy trucks. One transport company with 35 heavy trucks mentioned that they would have to expand their subscription of power from the present 80 Ampere to 1200 Ampere to charge 20 trucks on a regular basis. A few expansions on this scale rapidly soak up the surplus capacity in a grid area. It has been estimated by Volvo Truck that between 1,000 and 2,000 trucks every day come to the area of Hisingen in Gothenburg to load or unload. Many of them will need to be charged during these stops. In large European cities like Hamburg, Paris, or London, many more trucks will visit each day and it is unlikely that power grids can handle this without substantial expansion.
The above situation will be found also in Warsaw, Prague, Rome, Athens, and other large cities in countries with lower GDP per capita than the most affluent countries, where the conversion to electromobility has almost not started.
Is it fair to call decision makers and administrators who make decisions on behalf of the entire EU or their countries “Blind Guardians of Ignorance?” The failure of decision makers to take in the scale and complexity of the transformation to e-mobility is not a small, inconsequential mistake. Top politicians, like the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, Boris Johnson, Olaf Scholz, and many others effectively promise voters and citizens that European car transportation will become fossil-free by 2050, but this is not very likely, considering the enormous investments that will have to be made to achieve this.
Little Debate, No Preparations
Of course, all this investment will not have to be completed by 2035, but the expansion of power production, power grids, charging infrastructure, and training of workers and decision makers in the intricacies of electromobility will have to be well under way by that year. And at present there are not even any plans to start such large-scale expansion, not even in the countries of the EU that lead the transformation. The need to expand infrastructure has almost not been debated.
One of the experts that has described the expansion need is Elon Musk, who in an interview at the CodeCon 2021 conference replied to a question from the audience, that countries need to double power production and that investment will be needed in all parts of power grids. The exchange appears one hour and one minute into the interview. Link to Interview Elon Musk
In his book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” from 2021, Bill Gates estimated that countries will have to double or triple electricity production to create a sustainable society, but this would of course include power needs for other purposes than e-mobility.
In December of 2020 the Chairman of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, declared that investment in infrastructure of between 135 and 358 billion dollars will be needed in Japan to change to electromobility.
Expect an Avalanche of Expansion Needs
Most countries in Europe have less than 2 percent electric cars and almost no electric trucks or buses. Germany has about this share of electric vehicles. 10% of the cars of Norway are electric and in Sweden the figure stands at about 5%. Fleets of electric cars and transport vehicles will have to grow rapidly over the decade until 2035 and grow even faster after the sales of petrol and diesel cars have been banned. This will create an avalanche of expansion needs. The lack of preparation for the transformation will become apparent and it will be difficult to catch up, because all countries will need to buy large amounts of equipment, install power plants, wind turbines, solar cells, and expand grid capacity and charging infrastructure at the same time.
At the moment very few people have an overall picture of the expansion needs.
Governments have to shed their blindfolds and start to make real plans for the transformation, ones that include all the expansion and change activities that need to be undertaken. Once this happens, governments are likely to revise their goals for the transformation, but the damage to the trust in the plans of the EU and the governments of Europe will have been done and it is likely to be difficult to restore. The overly ambitious plans that have been set down represent no small mistake and the failure to develop realistic plans for the transformation will not go without consequences.
Mats is the author of five internationally published books on sustainability, focusing on the large-scale change to electromobility, the circular economy, and energy efficiency. His latest book is “The Blind Guardians of Ignorance — Covid -19, Sustainability, and Our Vulnerable Future” from 2020 and the first one of these was “Global Energy Transformation,” published in 2009.
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