A group of year 12 students from Woodford County High School attended a lunchtime debate in Cholmondeley Room in the House of Lords, on the practicalities of charging electric vehicles.
Our vehicles produce greenhouse gases, and dangerous levels of greenhouse gases are also emitted in the production of the fuel for these vehicles.
Vehicular transport is so deeply integrated into our lives, but the grave environmental cost of these vehicles means we must look for a solution. Some people consider the solution to lie with nuclear power, whereas most do not deem this a viable option due to the issue of nuclear waste.
Most people believe the answer lies with electric vehicles.
While this may seem like a golden solution – a clean and readily available means of powering our cars – there are many problems that need to be overcome for this to work properly, and these are not often discussed. These issues were the subject of the talk.
An example of the issues discussed were how there would be an unmeetable surge in the request of power when people would come home from work and plug in their cars to be charged.
Furthermore, most of our energy comes from non-renewable sources, it would take many hours to charge the car battery fully, and a fully charged electric car may only be able to drive a fraction of the distance that a petrol/diesel car with a full tank could.
