⚡In line with the electric vehicle transition, energy behemoth #Shell has decided to shut down a total of 1,000 fuel stations it owns or has a stake in by 2024 and 2025.
🔌The company is converting some existing stations into charging points in Europe and China, shifting its focus towards investments in charging infrastructure. With its Shell Recharge brand already operating 55,000 charging points, the global giant aims to expand its charging network to 200,000 points by 2030.
The number of EV’s sales is falling yet shell has decided to shut down a 1,000 petrol stations & convert them to EV charging. How is the UK to support such a large electrical infrastructure? Not that long ago the government was talking of brown outs & begging for the remaining coal power stations to remain open. The government has announced the building of new gas powered stations despite its pledge to be net zero bye 2050. The uk is currently buying electricity from abroad along with gas as the North Sea oil/gas platforms produce less & less gas & oil. We have no shortage for gas either, so we’ll be dependent on gas on a day to day bases. Will the tax payer be forced to pay for the lost revenue from petrol/diesel sales or will the burden be heaped on the few that can afford an EV. The cheapest EV being the fiat 500 £28,000 has a miserable range of 100 miles at best & with no price cap per kilowatt at road side charging points. I’ve seen some charging 85 pence per kilowatt, so an EV with a 100 kilowatt battery that’ll cost you £85 to fully charge. With tesla lying about the range of its EV’s, your talking 240 miles for £85. Then you have the risks of EV fires & multistorey carparks that were never designed for the extra weight, plus they’d have to upgrade the sprinkler systems, emergency exits to cope with an ev/s fire/s. Then there’s the insurance premiums, wear & tear on brakes, tyres, suspension & of course the road. In american studies, EV’s tore through crash barriers like a knife through butter & what about a head on crash with conventional vehicles?. Then there’s the disposal of the batteries, in Australia 90% of EV batteries went into landfill, then there’s the scrap yard fires caused by lithium batteries, plus the number of homes that have been totally gutted by charging an EV in a garage or near a property. None of this has been thought through clearly, Rolls Royce has been given the go ahead to build 12 new nuclear power stations but a report that came out in 2017, points out that if China continues to build nuclear power stations at the rate it is today, all easily obtainable nuclear fuel could run out in less than 7 years.