Well Boris Johnson has now fired the starting gun banning the sale of fossil fuelled cars from 2030, so in real terms this gives us at best nine years to get all the problems sorted around the recharging of electric vehicles at home and at other locations.

Basically for the wholesale uptake of this there is going to have to be a massive effort put in place in Lancashire where due to the predominate type of housing which have no off street parking available, the vast majority of people will NOT be able to own and use an electric vehicle, and will have to carry on using a ‘dirty fossil fuelled vehicle’.

Taking Hyndburn as an example that’s roughly 24,000 ‘dirty fossil fuelled vehicles’. This will be replicated through the rest of Lancashire and also the UK.

There have been suggestions that people could charge an EV at a place of work, at a supermarket, or in a charging compound which all do sound great ideas, but that is just trying to shift the problem on to someone else.

In real terms you would still need the same amount of charging points whichever way you try to partition the problem. Again taking Hyndburn as an example you need at least 6,000 on-street charging points (this assumes charging only every four days), along with charging points at every home that has its own off street parking.

There will be a requirement to dig up every street, road, avenue, and cul-de-sac in Lancashire where there are homes or businesses in order to install all these extra cables to charging points as well as making upgrades to the electricity supply cables and infrastructure (pylons, poles and substations), along with new sources of green renewable energy.

As the current truly green renewables only supply at best 25% CO2 free electricity (this is from government figures) we will need more allowances from planning for more and varied types of green power sources such as hydro that is currently rarely used.

So who is going to pull their finger out and get this going as we have 2,250 days to get this sorted?

Michael Ashworth