Whatever happens to oil price and demand, Treasury isn't going to wait till 2040 to find a way to tax "automotive electricity". I'm going to guess we'll see something around 2021. The question is how they do it: A special duty for electricity from rapid chargers? Some way of deciding what domestic current is being used for, either technological or bureaucratic? Or just slap it on all electricity?
And yes, this stuff could really do with being split!
Oh, that I could do that! It is a fascinating discussion, which may even challenge entrenched opinions, but it doesn't belong here. Strictly, it doesn't belong anywhere on the
FGW▸ Coffee Shop forum, but I am sure that
TPTB▸ (see Abbrevs list) will find a place, given that electricity is central to electrification.
Which takes me sort of back on thread. If we are going to electrify public transport, the mainline railway is the obvious place to start. National Grid power lines often follow railway corridors, putting supply options close to demand. Commuter rail lines and tramways use less power per train mile, if not per passenger mile - and I am sure that ET or II will provide equations. Only around 30% of the rail network is currently electrified, and with the sort of power the big trains use, it is clear that if we switched the whole network over to electricity tomorrow, there would be generational problems.
In fact, while figures of how much electricity is produced by different sources are bandied about, hailed, or debunked, it remains a truth that less than 40% of our nation's energy use is, at the point of use, provided by electricity. We have
HSTs▸ that use diesel to produce electricity to power motors that transport a few hundred passengers and a few hundred gallons of diesel and a generator/rectifier rig weighing a couple of hundred tonnes each train. We heat our homes by oil,
LPG▸ or gas (or coal and logs in the case of my Devon hideaway), most of us cook our food by gas. And the big heffalump in the room is the 90%+ of road vehicles powered by fossil fuels.
We need to turn this around, or at least the conventional wisdom says, and I don't disagree with that. I will not shed any tears when coal finally disappears off the power generation agenda, nor oil, which is almost gone in this country anyway.
The Chancellor has no problem in balancing the books. The market will do it for him. Currently, the
VAT▸ rate on household power is a quarter that of goods, and while you can trickle charge one of your Teslas in the time it takes to entertain your supermodel missus and her Ukrainian cousin you will not be able to separate automotive power from home consumption. The Chancellor will instead find ways to levy the tax at the point of production rather than consumption. When the price of such cars drops, however, you may find it cheaper.
We may find electricity becomes expensive in a progressive way, as Bmblbzzz suggested, and as actually happened in, I believe France, when a primitive leccy meter tipped ball bearings into a container as you turned on the appliances. Think - why else would we have "Smart" meters? Some apparently learned academics suggest that we can all use our washing machines at 3 am when don't want our sleep interrupted by a washing machine, so that we can use wind turbines and solar power to do the business. I'm not sure about you, but I don't see the sun shining at 5 pm on a December night. Nor do I see the wind blowing during those sometimes month long winter highs. The "Smart" meters are no different to the plans for differential pricing by petrol stations to change the price throughout the day, tried in the early eighties, and abolished in the early eighties. We all love a bargain.
Before you say I am pointing out the problems without suggesting a solution, I am up for Thorium rather than Uranium as a fuel for a chain of nuclear power stations. That would power the base load of around 30GWh, any excess being used to charge electric cars. Or storage heaters. There would be no need for any batteries, at least not until we have several million wind turbines, possibly one each, as we need diesel backup for each MWh now.
