Responding to the ban on the sale of diesel and gasoline-powered vehicles from 2040, National Grid, the UK electricity and gas utility, has told the British government that its infrastructure will be ready ten years before, by 2030, the year when India plans to ban the sale of internal combustion engines. Norway has said it will do so by 2025, while other countries have announced similar plans with different deadlines, in what is increasingly being shown to be a reasonable, perfectly viable and genuinely common sense measure.
National Grid’s assertion chimes with those of US utilities, which see electric vehicles not only as their salvation, but also as the salvation of the planet. Recent studies show that the United States could meet most of its energy needs from the wind and the sun: in a system designed for an overcapacity of 150% and with the appropriate battery systems — of the type installed by Tesla in South Australia — a combination of 70% solar and 30% wind power could supply 100% of the country’s power.
The ways things are going, the three-thirds goal defined by Michael Liebreich, the Chairman of the Advisory Board of Bloomberg New Energy Finance: one third of global electricity from wind and solar, one third of vehicles electrically powered, and the world’s economy will produce one third more GDP from every unit of energy by 2040) is looking decidedly modest.