O THE IRONY. As the illegal US-Israel attack on Iran sent petrol prices soaring, there was celebration in China this week as BYD launched an electric car battery that can be “refueled” for 400 km in just five minutes—in other words, as quickly as a petrol car.
Final barrier gone.
Given the bargain prices of Chinese electric cars, this doesn’t just kill the last reason to be reluctant to buy one – it makes it dumb not to switch.
This is great news, since a number of entities (countries and companies) worldwide have pledged to switch to electric cars by 2030, which is just 45 months away.
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BEHIND THE SCENES
But behind the scenes there’s another miracle. The BYD car can be refuelled at that speed because it used a charger that delivers 1.5 megawatts of power. The Chinese government is installing thousands of megawatt chargers across the country.
But what about other nations? They don’t have such things. The fastest chargers in the UK, for example, are a quarter of the speed of the BYD charger. Many other countries are not even up to that level.
So, you say, surely they can be speeded up?
Actually, no. In the UK, you’d have to upgrade all the substations and local networks first. And since there are 17 different electricity suppliers in the country, getting them all to work together to achieve this will be difficult.
In short, countries with public-owned utilities will be able to co-ordinate nationwide upgrades. But places with splintered, privatized electricity companies will struggle to make that jump.
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REASONS FOR THE DIVIDE
This tends to be seen as a communist-capitalist divide, but it isn’t really. A range of countries like China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the Netherlands, have public (state-owned) electricity providers and can co-ordinate a nationwide upgrade. The UK used to be on this list, after the war, but then went through a privatization frenzy.
The root of the problem, oddly, may just be labelling. The concept of “state control” is labelled “socialist” or “communist” and dismissed, while private ownership is dubbed “capitalist” and declared to be a good thing.
The trouble is, when one is talking about utilities, it’s clear that state control is not just a good thing, it’s a necessary thing. And not just for energy. All you have to do is compare the railway systems of China and the UK to show that central planning makes a huge difference in creating public transport systems.
As for energy, the result of choices made are already becoming clear: China is hitting its clean energy goals years early, while other nations will struggle to hit the deadlines they have set themselves.
A simple solution is for government ministers in countries around the world to declare: “I don’t care if you call me a socialist or a communist, the government’s job is to make sure the people have functioning, affordable utilities.”
Who’s going to start?