Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Seventh sitting)

Matt Western Excerpts

Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 16th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Alan Brown]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

New clause 13 would formalise the need for a reporting strategy for establishing charge points covering the varied demographics and geography of the UK, and would include differentiating between rural and urban areas. I appreciate that the Minister has spoken at length about the commitment to consider how we can roll out so as to ensure that rural areas are not left behind.

Again, this is about ensuring a UK-wide approach and picking up on other investment required for rural areas, which I have touched on before, such as mobile coverage upgrades. Additionally, as other hon. Members have highlighted, a strategy for domestic properties needs to be developed covering solutions such as charging points accessible to terraced houses and flats, and possibly roll-out in future developments, so that infrastructure is incorporated as new developments take place. We also need to consider the road networks and allow best practice to be rolled out fully across the UK. That is the idea behind the clause, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

As I did on Second Reading, I want to re-emphasise the point about the provision for other forms of electric vehicle—the Minister and I have had conversations elsewhere about it—particularly in the provisions for EV buses, for example, and cycles.

We are facing a revolution, not just in cars but in all forms of mobility. It is incumbent on us to recognise that at this juncture we should be thinking about how to integrate those needs into the Bill, and specifically about infrastructure. We have talked about where sites might be located, and about commercial properties, but we should be thinking specifically about the infrastructure needed for buses in our town centres. I urge that that be incorporated into the new clause as well.

[Alan Brown]

I welcome that intervention. It is a valid point; we need to look at the wider considerations. Buses and other vehicles are the biggest polluters in terms of NOx, so it is certainly an important consideration. As I said, I will be happy to hear the Minister’s response; I hope that it will encapsulate these issues as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am delighted that the Minister is talking to the National Grid and others. I entirely sympathise with the hon. Gentleman’s desire to see a transparent product of those discussions: a continuous published analysis of impacts.

There are two kinds of impact. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the adverse impact on the grid from peak moments early in the morning or late in the evening, and in winter there is a lot of fast charging, which will increase the peak effect. However, I am much more interested in the other kind of impact, which I see as much more serious: the benefits, which many of us have seen for some years, that the National Grid anticipates from peak shaving. Night-time, and indeed daytime, vehicle charging can be switched off at moments indicated as economically advantageous to the car owner by the half-hourly settlement price. It is also highly economically advantageous for the grid to have reduced demand at such moments, avoiding the need for additional power. That would transform the economics of intermittent energy supply, including through renewables, for example solar, which are currently not regarded as having any contribution to capacity. I am very much in favour of new clause 14’s general principle; I am sure the Minister is about to assure us that he will fulfil that principle through regular publications.

[Matt Western]

To emphasise the point and go back to buses, which I mentioned earlier, the scale of the need will be quite significant, say in our town centres, where we may have a bus that will be using these charge points for opportunity charging—an immediate fast charge—drawing 300 kW. If we think about, say, 10 buses in our town centres, we can imagine what sort of requirement would be needed. I add that to the debate.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

The hon. Gentleman is clearly right that the bus issue is serious. This is not the place for a prolonged discussion about the patterns of charging and so on, but my own instinct is that battery life will have got to the point at which overnight charging will probably mainly suffice for buses. I am also quite optimistic about the ability to have charging en route on the most thickly used routes. Let us leave that aside for the moment. Clearly, we are joined in the view that the Minister will need, through the grid and others, to publish assessments of all kinds of use and storage, including not just cars but buses, taxis and vans, and indeed bicycles, although that is a minor item.

Another issue connected to new clause 14 goes back to the third of the letters that the Minister has helpfully written to the Committee in response to points that I raised earlier about clauses 11 and 12. I am very grateful for the subsequent discussions the Minister has facilitated about that with his officials. I hope he can confirm that he will now look at one specific issue further, which I do not think is wholly handled in the third of his letters. That is the question of ensuring that the vires given by clause 12(1) and (2), for him or the Secretary of State to issue regulations mandating the transfer of data from charge points through to the grid and the distribution network operators, are sufficiently well established by a technical drafting amendment to ensure that they are not challenged successfully in court.

That is obviously vital, because if the spirit of new clause 14 is to be observed and the grid is to be able to publish reasonably reliable forecasts of the pattern of charging and storage provided or demanded by electric vehicles, it needs to be able to use and mine the data from the use and charging of electric vehicles as it evolves. The only way to structure an electricity system is to plan some years ahead. Therefore, we need evolving information to be relayed from an early stage, so that before the load or the opportunity for storage become very big, the pattern is well understood.

To say one further word about that, the Committee must be aware that it is not a marginal point. If those patterns are well understood, the history suggests that one can save in the order of one quarter to one third of the investment costs of the entire electricity supply industry, compared with a situation in which there is chaotic unanticipated demand. The whole system relies on ensuring that one has a capacity margin at peak. If we cannot accurately predict the peak, because we do not understand the configurations of demand and supply on the system, we have to over-provide. We thus end up having bought a lot of heavy metal that is sitting there doing nothing, which is very expensive for the economy. We are talking about fives or 10s of billions of pounds. It is material that that data flow starts, starts early, and starts accurately, without missing anything off, so that the grid can start building a transparent picture that then, as in the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun’s new clause 14, is regularly published and updated.