Drivers get more time to go electric in energy strategy. That was the headline that appeared above a recent online newspaper article about the Scottish government’s new 194-page ‘Draft Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan’, which apparently moved the phase-out date for new petrol and diesel car sales from 2030 to 2032. It soon turned out that far from representing a major policy shift, the whole story rested on a simple error in the original document, which the Scottish government swiftly corrected. But this false alarm did get me wondering whether governments might be tempted to rethink the sometimes ambitious electric switchover targets they have set themselves as the road to our lower carbon future starts to get a bit bumpy.

One of the issues that isn’t going away is growing dissatisfaction with public charging infrastructure. Remember that quaint old thing called range anxiety? That seems to be fading away thanks to long range EVs capable of doing well over 300 miles on a single charge, and a growing realisation that small runabouts don’t really need huge batteries. In its place, we have ‘charge anxiety’ as it was recently described by Mike Hawes, head of the main UK motor industry trade body, the SMMT. Charge anxiety is the fear that when you arrive at a planned charging stop, the facilities will be out of action, occupied, or behave in a frustratingly flaky manner that causes delays.

 One thing to bear in mind is that a rapid charging unit is a sophisticated piece of equipment, so rolling out this sort of infrastructure is going to be a big and expensive project. My home (slow) charger is a small and simple affair, no bigger than a shoebox, which an electrician was able to wire up and connect to my standard home consumer unit in a couple of hours. A few days ago, I was walking across the car park at my local leisure centre and noticed that a technician was working on one of the heavily used rapid chargers that are sited there. These charging units are quite large – perhaps two metres tall and more than half a metre wide – and the cover of this particular one had been removed. I’m not an engineer, but I’d previously assumed that rapid chargers had large housings mainly for reasons of across-the-car-park visibility, or so that charging cables could be attached at a practical height. But this one was stuffed full with a huge mass of componentry – and there’s another whole layer of cost and complexity on top, once you get beyond the charging units themselves and into the supporting infrastructure.

Previously I’ve argued in Bright Spark that we probably don’t need much in the way of government intervention or a big grand plan to promote the build-out of rapid charging infrastructure. That view was based on the precedent of the filling station network for petrol and diesel, which was developed mainly on a commercial basis. The government’s role has typically been limited to subjects like setting minimum standards for facilities to be signed as ‘Services’ on the most important A-roads. The government did play a more active role in the early days of the motorway network, when it planned the location of service areas and provided the sites. This was later replaced by a more liberalised system in which sites were developed increasingly at the initiative of private developers

Now I’m beginning to wonder whether the whole thing doesn’t need a big plan and more of a push from the government after all. There has already been impressive growth in the numbers of rapid chargers on the motorway network – now you often see whole rows of the things, not just the few that used to be the norm at most sites until recently. EVs still only make up about 2% of all the cars on UK roads and yet on busy days the capacity of even this greatly improved infrastructure to cope with demand is already being tested. This is a problem that probably needs some innovative and quite fundamental new thinking, not just an incremental increase in the number of rapid chargers.

 So could any governments that are getting cold feet really delay their switchover dates? I’m sceptical. This is all probably already baked in to the plant investment plans and new model launch schedules of the big car makers, so I think the ability of any single country to step out of line would now be limited in practice.