Re : The big issue If anyone is buying an electric car, I suggest they investigate one of the 'Economy' schemes for their electric supply. You get a much cheaper rate overnight, usually 7 or 10 hours, to reduce the charging costs. Incidentally, though not car related, everyone will be on something similar by 2040 as gas heating is phased out for electric storage heaters in homes.

There is no gas in my village, so my home is already on the off peak Economy 7 tariff. You can only qualify for this tariff if your main source of heating is electricity, which mine is.

If everyone charged electric cars overnight, usage in the off peak period would increase to the point where it would approach the daytime rate. That would spell the end of the cheaper overnight rates.

...and one other crutial aspect the greenies conveniently forget - there's no solar power available at night, and in winter, the wind in the UK is mostly highly variable, but often not enough to turn the wind turbine blades or too high and they have to be shut down for safety reasons.

As such, the only non-fossil fuel electricity would either have to come from nuclear (which they hate and will soon expereience a period of dramatic falls in output as ageing power stations go offline and new ones aren't even out of the planning stages), or tidal (which are currently non-existent, are still in early development, not capable of serving the whole nation, aren't very environmentally-friendly to the local ecology, and by their nature not constant in output).

I agree that if large numbers of the population start swapping to EVs, we'll either have to keep relying on 'less green' electricity generation and will have to pay a LOT more for electricity generally and to set up a viable national network of charging stations, especially because many people live in homes/work in areas that either cannot (at all) have viable charging stations for all who'd need them or that doing so would be prohibitively expensive to install and maintain.