Electric Vehicles: Impact on Household Energy Bills

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right: we do expect the transition to electric vehicles and heat pumps to create significant new demands for electricity. Ensuring that local electricity networks are prepared for current and future demand is the responsibility of the distribution network operators—the DNOs—who are incentivised to do this through the regulatory framework known as price control, set by Ofgem. This includes making additional funding available via uncertainty mechanisms, which allow DNOs to access funding for net-zero-related projects that were uncertain at the start of price control but become more certain later on. As electricity becomes a common fuel, it will bring certain challenges, which the Government are endeavouring to address.

[Lord Birt (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I have just bought my first EV, and it has been a salutary experience. A cable of the length that we require to charge direct from our home is out of stock. We also planned to have a charge point in our garden, but our installer, one of the major players, did not have the standard model in stock. It has had to be imported from the Netherlands and has been delivered late. From order to installation will have taken nearly seven weeks. Does the Minister agree that, if public confidence in EVs is to grow, the EV industry must radically improve and foreshorten its processes?