Weekend press round-up: ‘Soon it will be hard to justify buying a petrol car’

In our latest review of sector coverage across the national newspapers, concerns about an electric car bubble are discussed. There is also an update on progress towards developing nuclear fusion. Meanwhile, Aggreko’s board has accepted a £2.3 billion private equity bid.

‘Soon it will be hard to justify buying a petrol car’, says ChargePoint boss

Nobody could accuse Pasquale Romano of jumping on the bandwagon. Electric vehicles may be all the rage in 2021, but when he took over ChargePoint a decade ago, his options were far more limited.

Romano was one of the first to take delivery of the Fisker Karma, an early plug-in hybrid car released in 2011 that ceased production after fewer than 2,500 models. He is now on his third Tesla while his wife drives a Polestar, made by Volvo’s electric subsidiary.

“We have not been able to burn any gasoline for a very long time; I don’t know how to use a pump any more,” Romano says from his solar-powered California home.

He may have had to wait, but battery-powered transport is finally having its moment. Tesla has become one of the world’s most valuable companies and depending on the day, its chief executive is the first or second richest person on the planet.

Almost every week, an established automaker seems to bring forward the deadline by which they will no longer sell petrol-powered cars. Rumours abound that Apple is set to enter the fray. And investor demand for newly-public electric vehicle makers is seemingly insatiable, despite most being yet to sell a single vehicle.

Romano bats away suggestions of an electric car bubble. “Investors are very confident that this is going to be the way transportation and mobility is going to evolve. And it’s here to stay. All the auto manufacturers are pouring into this, and companies associated with it like ours are likely to scale for many years running. Our valuation is getting the credit for that growth potential. It’s not going to be three years of growth or five, it’s over a decade, two decades.”

Overvaluation may be a nice problem to have. ChargePoint was founded five years before Tesla, and Romano says that in his early years, he often struggled to get a hearing from backers. “I found myself thinking I was going in to raise money and spending the whole time arguing with potential investors over whether it was going to be electricity or hydrogen fuel or battery swapping. But if everyone else had seen it, there would have been no opportunity.”

ChargePoint, unlike other charging networks, does not invest in charging points itself. It sells them to homeowners, businesses and fleet operators, and allows them to set the price for electricity, charging a fee for installation and the software needed to maintain them.

“We’re the world’s biggest network, it’s just not our capital expenditure,” says Romano. “It’s like Airbnb is the largest hotel chain in the world without owning any hotels.”

That, however, makes it beholden to those willing to invest in charging networks. Electric cars are now arriving in large enough numbers that few doubt their inevitability, and last year Boris Johnson pledged to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2030.

But the aggressive timetable has been met by concerns that there are simply not enough places to plug them in, which in turn could put off prospective buyers. The think tank Policy Exchange recently declared that 35,000 charging points a year need to be installed over the next decade, up from 7,000 today.

“The chicken and egg thing is a misconception,” Romano says. “The charging infrastructure is not what’s holding back the electric vehicle market. In fact, I think the universe has unrealistic expectations.”

The misconception, Romano argues, is rooted in a century of car owners filling their vehicles at petrol pumps or service stations. Instead, he claims, the vast majority of electric cars will be charged at home or in office car parks when people are at their desks. Delivery vans, taxis and lorries will charge up at depots, rather than on the road.

Daily Telegraph

Expensive public chargers drive up the cost of electric car ownership

Electric vehicle drivers without off-street parking are being charged hundreds of pounds more to recharge their vehicles than those who have their own plug point.

Even the cheapest public chargers cost double the rate of a home charger, while the most expensive can outstrip the cost of refuelling a petrol or diesel car, research reveals.

The low cost of recharging is sold as one of the key benefits of owning an electric vehicle (EV), particularly as the ticket price of a battery vehicle is still higher than petrol or diesel cars.

But research shared with i suggests the savings diminish dramatically if drivers rely on public charge points. Given that nearly a third of drivers in the UK have no access to off-street parking, this condemns millions of drivers to higher transport costs when they switch to an EV.

An investigation by EV website My Urban Car reveals driving an electric car 1,000 miles can cost more than driving a petrol or diesel car the equivalent distance, depending on the charge point used.

A petrol or diesel car boasting fuel efficiency of 45 miles per gallon would require about £115-131 worth of fuel to drive 1,000 miles. Charging an electric car – in this case a Tesla Model 3 – to travel the equivalent distance can cost almost £200 on the most expensive public chargers, compared to just £15 using a home charger.

Fast chargers are usually more costly than slower plug points. Ionity offers ultra-rapid 350kW plug points that inject 80 miles of range into a car’s battery in just 15 minutes. But it is also the most expensive provider in My Urban Car’s analysis, with costs totalling £196 for 1,000 miles of driving.

David Nicholson, who conducted the analysis for My Urban Car, pointed out that some public charge points are much cheaper. An Ubitricity lamppost charger would cost around £68 to charge a Tesla Model 3 for 1,000 miles of driving, while a BP Polar charger would cost around £85. “Finding good value public charging can be confusing for newer EV owners as prices vary wildly,” he told i.

The findings are backed by a study published last month by What Car? magazine, which found that the cost of recharging a BMW iX3 can cost £40 at the most expensive charge points, six times the cost of using a home charger.

What Car? said the cheapest pay-as-you-go public recharge available was offered by BP Pulse, costing just under £10 for a recharge on its 7.4kW chargers. Source London’s “flexi” 7.4kW chargers were named as the most expensive option, with a recharge costing £40.66 at some of the operator’s central London charge points. In response, Source London said its prices include the cost of parking, and stressed cheaper tariffs are available if drivers sign up to its membership offer or charge at night.

Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said drivers relying on public chargers should do their research. “Motorists lucky enough to have off-street parking where a charge point can be fitted might benefit from very competitive domestic electricity prices, but those reliant on public charging will need to do a bit more homework on the opportunities available to them,” he told i.

iNews

Things are hotting up in quest for energy’s holy grail: nuclear fusion

Several times a day, for a few seconds, a village in rural Oxfordshire becomes the hottest place in the solar system.

Culham, population 450, is the site of the world’s most powerful nuclear fusion experiment. And this summer it is set to make history as scientists prepare for the biggest advance in decades on the road to limitless energy.

Since 1983 physicists at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, in a bend of the Thames just south of Abingdon, have been quietly trying to make the dream of nuclear fusion a reality. Their project, the Joint European Torus (JET), smashes atoms together at temperatures of up to 150 million degrees celsius, ten times the heat at the centre of the sun, in an effort to harness the extraordinary energy produced by the resulting reaction.

In June, they will start work on a potent fuel mix they have not attempted for decades — deuterium, an isotope also known as heavy hydrogen, and tritium, a rarer and radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Professor Ian Chapman, chief executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, said: “Hopefully we’ll set a record for fusion energy produced. I have high confidence we will get good results.”

Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy production, mimicking the reaction at the centre of the sun. Two atoms of hydrogen, the most abundant chemical in the universe, are fused together to form helium, releasing a surge of energy.

The process was first demonstrated nearly 70 years ago. But replicating the physics of the centre of the sun is a significant challenge. In the sun hydrogen fuses under immense gravity. On earth it has to be achieved with extreme heat.

In Culham, that process is attempted about 20 times a day. Hydrogen is heated by energising, electrifying and firing atoms at the mix, until atoms fuse.

The last time the team attempted this with deuterium and tritium was in 1997. The experiment was a landmark, producing 16 megawatts of power, enough to power a small town. They had proved nuclear fusion could be a source of energy. But the power spike lasted just 0.15 seconds. “We went up to a lot of power and then lost control of it,” Chapman said. “It came down very quickly. Now we’ve got a lot more control over the field, we can make it last a lot longer.”

Since they last combined deuterium and tritium they have spent years refining the way fuel is pumped into the reaction chamber. They have carried out most of the experiments with deuterium alone because tritium’s radioactivity makes it hard to handle. It is also expensive, at up to £70,000 a gram. This summer the team plans to use 60g of tritium too, which it will recycle.

It is a proof of principle for a much larger experiment. When JET produced 16MW of power, 24MW was required as an input. The process is so energy intensive that the Culham scientists have to warn National Grid in advance.

“The key thing is scale,” Chapman said. In a small nuclear reaction, a lot of energy escapes from the centre of the gas ball to the edge, in the form of heat, where it has to be safely removed. “There is a lot of waste.” A bigger reaction retains more energy within the gas ball.

After the success at Culham, 35 countries united to fund a bigger machine, called Iter (Latin for “the way”). Sited in Provence, France, Iter involves America, Japan, Russia, China, India and most of Europe. It is the world’s biggest science experiment, at a £20 billion cost.

Because of its size, Iter will achieve what JET cannot: efficiency. “We will put 50MW in and we will get 500MW out,” said Chapman. “That is enough to power a city the size of Leeds or Liverpool.”

The Sunday Times

Eco-homes become hot property in UK’s zero-carbon ‘paradigm shift’

Instead of parking spaces, it’s flowerbeds and vegetable planters that line the car-free street of Solar Avenue in Leeds, where rows of 60 low-energy homes form a little oasis along a bend in the River Aire, a short walk from the city centre.

Built in a factory across the road, these terrace houses are made from super-airtight timber panels stuffed full of wood-fibre insulation, with triple-glazed windows and solar panels on the roof, each erected in less than a week. Using up to 10 times less energy than a conventional house, their heating demand is so low that they create excess electricity that is fed into a community grid and used to charge shared electric cars. There will soon be 1,000 such homes here, along with a combined primary school and care home, as well as a timber office building with yoga decks and a tennis court on the roof, together forming the pioneering Climate Innovation District.

A few years ago these houses would have been experimental one-offs. But a green-design campaign group has calculated there are as many as 30,000 low-carbon homes in the pipeline, an impressive turnaround in which the industry is leading the way, ahead of government regulation.

“The way we build housing in the UK hasn’t changed much since the Victorian era,” says Chris Thompson, the founder of Citu, the developer behind the Leeds project, which plans to build 500 low-energy homes a year. “It’s all driven by perceived risk. Anyone looking to build something has to answer to a funder, who’ll use valuers to ensure that what you’re proposing has a market.”

Shifting the mindset of such a risk-averse industry can seem like an insurmountable challenge, not helped by the government dragging its heels on policy changes. But now, after scrapping Labour’s zero-carbon homes target in 2015, the Conservative government has finally developed a future homes standard, which will mandate all new homes to be “zero-carbon-ready” – although not until 2025 at the earliest.

So it has been the landlords with a long-term interest in the wellbeing of their tenants, and the longevity of their building stock, who are forging ahead with low-energy housing. Exeter city council, for example, has been quietly building zero-carbon homes for the last decade, with more than 200 council houses built so far to the exacting Passivhaus low-energy standard, and 1,000 more in the pipeline.

The Guardian

Power supplier Aggreko accepts £2.3bn private equity bid

Aggreko looks set to become the latest British business to fall into the hands of private equity after the board of the mobile power specialist recommended a £2.3bn bid.

Management, led by chairman Ken Hanna, said the offer of 880p a share from a consortium of I Squared of the US and TDR Capital of the UK was “an attractive price in cash that fairly recognises Aggreko’s future prospects”.

If the deal is agreed by shareholders, the company will join the growing list of UK-listed businesses taken private.

More than 10 companies are in talks with private equity as the end of Brexit uncertainty and optimism over the vaccine rollout galvanises interest in London, the worst-performing equity region last year.

“It does seem a bit like a siege of London,” said one fund manager. Private equity, he added, “is on a completely different playing field, they can gear up massively with cheap capital”.

Their offer of 880p represents a premium of 39 per cent to the closing price on February 4, the day before the offer was made public to the market. The deadline to agree terms of a deal was 5pm on Friday.

Shares in Aggreko were trading at 898.50p at lunchtime on Friday on hopes a rival bidder might emerge.

Analysts at Peel Hunt said the offer for Aggreko was in line with expectations.

Andrew Brooke at RBC Capital Markets, however, noted that “the shares are worth more”.

The Financial Times