National Grid backs bringing ban on fuel vehicle sales forward a decade

The National Grid would back phasing out the sale of all new diesel and petrol cars ten years ahead of the government’s 2040 target date, according to its head of electric vehicles (EVs).

Graeme Cooper, the grid’s director for EVs, told MPs this morning (27 March) that the transmission network could respond if the ban on internal combustion engine powered vehicles was brought forward by a decade.

Giving evidence to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) select committee’s inquiry into EVs, he said: “We would probably actually support a more ambitious target. It gives focus and allows networks to respond appropriately.”

Cooper said the number of consumers buying petrol and diesel cars in the decade running up to 2040, the target date set for the government ban on the sale of such vehicles, was likely to dwindle.

He was backed up on the timing by Andrew Burgess, associate partner, energy systems integration at Ofgem, who told the committee a 2030 phase out of internal combustion engine powered cars “wouldn’t be a problem”.

Burgess said: “The key lesson from the uptake of solar is the need to be able to react much more quickly.”

And Stewart Reid, chair of the Energy Networks Association’s low carbon technologies working group, said his member companies were gearing up for a more rapid switch over to EVs than 2040.

“We are working on the basis that there could be a bow-wave before then due to customer choices.”

Cooper also told the committee that the National Grid’s predictions last summer that the UK will need up to 8GW of extra electricity generation capacity by 2030 to deal with peak demand from additional EVs was based on a “worst case” scenario that everybody who bought an electric car would want to charge it at the same time.

“The probability of seeing that demand is close to zero,” he said, adding that smarter charging could cut peak additional generation requirement by around “three-quarters”.

“There is enough capacity on the transmission system for us not to do significant upgrades.”

But Cooper warned the roll out of EV charging points at motorway service stations could be difficult to achieve within Ofgem’s network price control framework.

He said the charging points, which will be needed in order to enable motorists to take long journeys in their electric vehicles, would be “expensive” and “difficult to co-ordinate” within RIIO.

Cooper said this additional charging infrastructure, which could be facilitated by the close alignment of the transmission and motorway networks, would facilitate the more rapid roll out of EVs.

Reid said smarter charging could buy time for the networks to upgrade their infrastructure.