Electric cars and heat pumps seem destined to make us freeze

By Paul Homewood

Ross Clark is spot on as usual:

 

 

It’s been a pretty cold week in the northern United States, with temperatures down to minus 18 Celsius in Chicago. But it will have felt even colder, I dare say, if you have been standing around waiting to charge your Tesla. One owner complained of waiting five hours in a queue to charge his vehicle as low temperatures sapped the batteries of electric cars and made it more difficult to charge them. He said he counted 10 cars being towed away as they couldn’t be charged. In one case a motorist said he had plugged in his electric car for two days running, three hours at a stretch – and still his car was saying it had zero per cent charge.

There’s been a lot written about the cost and lack of range of electric vehicles but there is another issue which needs to be addressed as the Government tries to force more and more of them onto the road: resilience. An electric car might be efficient being driven along on a warm summer’s afternoon, but there seems to be a loss of efficiency as temperatures plunge towards zero and below. A failure of electric cars due to the cold might not matter too much when they are still mostly the playthings of the wealthy, but what happens if we reach a future where the tow trucks, delivery lorries and snow ploughs are electric, too? We face being left with dysfunctional road transport just at the time we need it most.

Resilience is the long-forgotten element of net zero – and not just for electric vehicles. We are being sold a future where almost everything will be powered by electricity – without much thought being put into what happens if the grid fails. At the moment, if the power goes down as it did in my house for several hours the other week, I can still light a fire, I can still drive, I can still make telephone calls, because for now I still have a phone line which doesn’t require broadband. But in future I may not be able to do any of those things. A power cut lasting more than a few hours will be a very serious matter for communities, which face being totally cut off, shivering.

Air source heat pumps seem especially vulnerable to these issues, with claims that efficiency drops in cold weather.. In a future where we are trying to use heat pumps to keep us warm, cold weather might well deliver a double whammy: we will need more power because the heat pump will be working overtime at a lower rate of efficiency, and yet the supply of renewable power could dip, in some weather conditions to disastrous lows.

There is no point in telling us we’ve got to get to net zero if you can’t tell us how we cope when we reach sub-zero. Yes, it does get cold sometimes, in spite of global warming, and we need to keep society running when it does.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/18/electric-cars-and-heat-pumps-seem-destined-make-us-freeze/