A wettish evening so opted for small umbie and scarf, rather than full wet weather gear, always a nuisance on occasions of this sort. I am pleased to report that my luck held on this occasion.
On the tube I decided that a lurid blue-green lipstick was most unattractive. The young lady concerned looked sensible enough, so I don't know what she was up to.
The Goat was busy and the barman managed to get into a bit of a muddle with our order, so I did not like to pull him up when he served me my warfarin water from a tap visibly marked 'not for human consumption'. Still here, but I suppose I had better pull them up if it happens again.
The RI was reasonably full for the occasion, including a celebrity in the form of Oliver Letwin, a gentleman who looked very sure about his own importance and who had probably spent more on his morning haircut than I have spent in years. A day when one might have thought there were plenty of other things for him to be doing - so perhaps we had made a mistake.
The compère from the Economist did pretty well at organising things. Then a jolly young civil servant who appeared to be leading the government drive to put electric cars on the road, with a bit of attention being paid to other low carbon options, like hydrogen cars, but with the assumption seeming to be that renewable electricity was the way forward. A Geordie engineer with a sense of humour, although one could get tired of his regional jokes and his milking his regional accents. Someone from Nissan. Someone from Shell. With this last having set herself the task of selling Shell as a green and cuddly operation - but sensibly including the nuts & bolts point that we are likely to want to continue to consume large amounts of oil and gas for some time yet, so Shell does have to keep digging the stuff up.
What the speakers really managed to ram in was the message that moving millions of cars from petrol to electricity was a huge venture, involving huge amounts of speculative money, very little of which was going to come from government. For example, a charging point, of which there need to be lots for electricity to thrive, might cost £50,000 a pop - to do, as things stand at present, very little business; a very small fraction of that needed to justify having the things in the normal way of doing business. A hope that all new homes from some date soon would have a suitable charging point built in - with suitable meaning good for overnight charging, rather than the much more expensive half hour charging that would be wanted on a motorway service station.
Corporate car fleets and public bus garages may be a way into all this. The economics work better when you have lots of vehicles in one place.
Much brave talk about how all these millions of electric cars are going to act as a giant national battery, pumping electricity into the grid when things are busy, and drawing it down when things are quiet.
The need to address concerns about the safety of these batteries. Batteries which could make laptop batteries bursting into flames seem very small beer. The need to train, for example, the fire and rescue services in how to neutralise then in the event of an accident. The need to train up the people working in the car industry generally.
The need to address what to do with all these batteries when their life in a car - perhaps a few years - was over. Were there other applications for them? What about recovering all the rare metals - some of which were mined in very dodgy conditions in darkest Africa. With the lady from Shell (I think) making reassuring noises about nearly all these rare metals coming from proper mines, nowhere near darkest Africa.
One questioner pointed out that there were much cheaper ways to make very large batteries than using the very compact technology needed for cars. A point which was not picked up by our panel, focused as they were on cars.
Another had an emotional pop at the human rights and environmental record of Shell.
While I was slightly irritated by the absence of what I regard as the elephant in the room. If we want to save the planet, we had better face up to the need for us, particularly us rich people in the western world, to start doing less. To find less energy expensive ways to amuse ourselves. To stop buying energy expensive goods and services. To stop relying on growth for ever. As things stand, it can't be sustained for the next century, never mind for ever. But then, maybe the ITER fusion people will come up with the goods, for which see reference 5.
Half Way House at Earlsfield in good shape. Service good and musak turned down to a reasonable level. But we failed to time our departure very well and had something of a wait at Raynes Park - where the platform library was by then shut, so no interest there.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/tesla-comes-to-town.html. Tesla has made it to Epsom.
Reference 2: https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/powerpack. The Tesla battery shop.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage.
Reference 4: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-for-low-emission-vehicles. The home of the jolly young civil servant. With the acronym of OFLEV bringing levitation to mind. But the only hint about organisation that I could find was the word 'team', in my day a group of maybe 10 to 20 people led by what was once called an assistant secretary.
Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/big-doughnuts.html.
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