Good work by the Spanish, demonstrating that decarbonising the economy requires you to actually *do* stuff, as well as *say* stuff.

Global warming apart, not enough people in this country seem to be concerned enough that running out of your own oil & gas, as we are, requires you to generate a dollar of exports for every dollar of oil & gas you go out & buy. Not something Britain’s crappy economy can easily do.

Final point on kerbside electric car recharging points:
Others have pointed this out before (I think George Monbiot), but it needs to more widely debated. Before we fool around investing in costly kerbside recharging points, wouldn’t it be better to standardise electric cars on an easily removable cassette or cartridge battery, so that at a normal filling station (an infrastructure we already have) you simply remove the drained battery and slot in a ready recharged one so you are ready to drive on straight away?

Claude,

11 Million Euros seems a bit low, does it not?

Two things need to be urgently settled before we move too far down the route towards electric motor vehicles.

That is a standardised power socket that all manufacturers support, and a standardised payment platform.

The power socket would be an easy one for the industry to sort out itself.

The payment model could be a selection of options including a swipe card at the charging point to SMS based payments via mobile phones, or even a NFC based mobile phones as is being considered for the UK public transport.

I would like to see the NFC route followed as that then creates a single payment account for both public and private transport, and breaks the physiological barrier that a car driver might feel about buying a ticket for the train/bus – they already have a ticket in their phone, as it is linked to their existing car transport fuel supply.

Holy…,
Yes you’re absolutely right. Apologies.
Where it says:

“oil bills would see savings of up to €11m a year”

I actually meant 11,000m a year

Thanks douglas clark for pointing that out!

A cars biggest carbon footprint is caused in manufacture/distribution. The “greenest” car is the one you already own

Don’t read too much into any exciting announcement from Spain. The current (“socialist”) government here has a more than Blairite addiction to launching trial balloons.

However, the old Spanish telephone monopoly – now trading as Telefonica – has the best record in Europe for finding profitable ways of upgrading and re-using old networks – and they own these old telephone boxes. If anyone can get this to work, they will.

@Matt Munro

The normal figure is around 10% of emissions come from production not use. Where you getting your figures from?

Electric cars have been the future of motoring for decades, they were the future about a century ago. Power production just makes sense on a really big scale.

Good to see Spain making some waves, the comparison with Blair is a little unfair. Mr Zapatero has even said “We won’t let businesses use this recession as an excuse to undermine workers rights.” Imagine Blair or Brown saying that. Workers’ rights *gasp*.

@3 IanVisits/anyone else who may have expertise

What do you think about my point that we need a removable battery so that the whole vehicle doesn’t have to remain parked while battery recharging takes place? Is it realistic? (Because unless recharging times are reduced dramatically, this is a real problem for the electric car..?)

This won’t reduce carbon emissions because fossil fuels will still be used to create the electricity. I’d suspect that the loss of energy in converting fossil fuels into electricity and then transporting it to recharging points could quite possibly render it less energy efficient, and so more carbon emitting, than conventional engines.

@10 “because fossil fuels will still be used to create the electricity”

I think it’s taken as read that they won’t be in the proportion that they are today (in some countries). Try to keep up, Sergeant!

@Sgt Skepper “This won’t reduce carbon emissions because fossil fuels will still be used to create the electricity”

I think that even if all the electricity to charge the batteries were to come from fossil fuels, CO2 emissions would still be reduced. This is mainly because electric motors are quite a lot more efficient than petrol ones and because electricity can be zapped across the country without using any energy, whereas petrol has to be chugged around in large lorries to get to the forecourt.

Left Outside @8: “The normal figure is around 10% of emissions come from production not use. Where you getting your figures from?”

The “normal figure” is 20% or 25% of energy consumption in manufacture relative to use. I’d like to point you in the direction of a decent study, but none exist. The last one I read was about US cars on US roads (roads are a big part of the equation when comparing transport systems). What happens in the USA is difficult to re-analyse elsewhere.

The “normal figure” is provided by car manufacturers. Car manufacturers make vehicles from steel and aluminium produced by somebody else, from plastics produced by somebody else, incorporating computers produced by somebody else etc. Thus we should question the “normal figure”.

When you make a ton of steel, you create tons of waste, not just tons of CO2. The waste from a ton of steel will make an unpleasant mound in your back garden, with its own disposal cost.

I am sure that the car manufacturers have considered the entire manufacturing process before announcing the “normal figure”. And that the “normal figure” is “optimised”.

Ah, cheers Charlie, I would love a study to see but your analysis of how a 10% figure is derived rings pretty true.

Mining, drilling, pumping and cutting down trees all realise a lot of carbon, but just like China is blamed for emmissions consumed in Britain, car manufactures would likely blame those emmissions of manufacturers who are vital, but not directly accountable.

Of course generally the question is not new car vs no new car, but new car vs clean new car.

Plus, a lot of motorists are going to end up being in India and China, and they haven’t bought their cars yet either. If we can lower the costs of being the first mover in the electric car nation game, it will pay dividends when it is more affordable for a country like China or India to do it

@12 What’s that Skip?

“electricity can be zapped across the country without using any energy”

That’s not really correct Skippy. There are quite large losses in the AC high voltage long distance transmission network of the National Grid. Also, the key point, a modern car engine is a more efficient converter of oil into power at the wheel than a power station (not that there are many – any? – oil-fired power stations left in UK).

So my guess is Sgt Skepper would be right, if we were going to rely on oil, gas & coal for our electricity. However, we move to electric cars on the assumption that we are moving our electricity supply over to wind, tide, nuclear. And electricity is definitely the best means of getting the energy of, for example, the tide in the Bristol Channel to power vehicles in our cities.