Are EVs a threat to national security?

[V]

I have been thinking today about what life might be like in the UK in 2032. If by then new petrol and diesel cars have been banned for two years. Car manufacturers had stopped selling the vast majority of ICE models before 2028. None had developed any new fossil fuelled vehicles since 2025 and production was now concentrated on BEVs. Petrol and diesel were now selling at over £10/L and very few people could still afford to run an old car for everyday transportation. Enthusiasts that still cherished their old cars would typically only use them for 1 day a month or less. Petrol stations have disappeared from supermarkets and the refuelling stations that are still open are nowhere near as numerous as they were a decade before.

 

What would it take to invade a country that depended on the electricity grid to charge the majority of public and private transportation? With almost no ability to store or distribute electrical energy without the grid, the grid itself, not just the power generation sites, would become an easy indefensible target to knock out. If Ambulances, Fire Engines, and supply trucks are all EVs, these vital services in a time of war will stop when the power runs out. Civil defence mobility would be impossible, we would back to unmechanised transport within days.

 

To a certain extent, a similar demise could be applicable to internal combustion vehicles but because liquid fuels can be packaged, stored and transported anywhere it makes it much harder to immobilise a nation that carefully safeguards war provisions. An invading land army would unlikely use BEV military vehicles for anything other than stealth attacks. Recharging on a battlefield would make them a lot more vulnerable than liquid refuelling.

 

My guess is that the nation that is last to electrify domestically will become the military superpower on earth. Future warfare is largely going to be waged using autonomous drones but any subsequent invasion is unlikely to be battery powered due to the ridiculous logistics of recharging an invasion force.

 

If you can destroy a country's ability to make diesel powered (multifuel) engines for civilian use you also erode that country's ability to make military transport and fighting vehicles. It will be interesting to watch UK diesel engine factories close and how that impacts MOD procurement over the next few years.

[Overlander21]

Is the electricity grid not a risk already?

 

I'm guessing all the oil refineries that porduce the petrol and diesel we use today are all powered by the grid?

 

2 hours ago, V said:

None had developed any new fossil fuelled vehicles since 2025

 

Now that is a scary thought. And a very valid point. And it's only two years from now

 

Legit though, why would any car manufacturer put a single penny in to the R&D of something that is going to be dead a few years later. They'd not get their return on that R&D investment.

 

Like many other posts on the subject here, I still don't know how it's feasible.  My office is two hours away. No electric car is going to get me there and back in winter, with the lights on, the heating, the heated seats, screen demisters, and the almost daily M62 closures due to accidents  

 

I couldn't get from home in the north west, to London where all my family are, on a single charge. The journey time will be insane.  It's all absolutely bonkers.

[tedthefed]

Vince , I wonder if anyone in the powers that be have thought about your comments.

 

[AlexK]

The EU may be about to come for existing cars, too, not just new ones. This is from an Autocar report (read the last para):

 

[UKTJ]

I think how vehicles are powered will be irrelevant if the bomb drops.

[neal]

15 hours ago, V said:

What would it take to invade a country that depended on the electricity grid to charge the majority of public and private transportation? With almost no ability to store or distribute electrical energy without the grid, the grid itself, not just the power generation sites, would become an easy indefensible target to knock out. If Ambulances, Fire Engines, and supply trucks are all EVs, these vital services in a time of war will stop when the power runs out. Civil defence mobility would be impossible, we would back to unmechanised transport within days.

This winter could show us a glimpse of this if we end up with planned power cuts. Currently I think the plan is for 3 hour outages, but I have seen something published that the worst case scenario that is being considered is 3 days.

 

The impact of 3 hours is considerable, but just think what 3 days off the grid would do for society.

This impact might not be that bad for sites that have some form of back up, or even solar on site, but the generator at my office only feeds a restricted area, has fuel storage for 48 hours!  Solar even at the best of time will not supply the normal demand load, but might stop the freezer becoming a casualty of the 3 day blackout.

 

Back to my office and the 48 hours of fuel, the question then is how do we refuel with no electricity. The fuel tanks are all electric pumps, so need to resolve that one. All the phones are now down as the masts are unlikely to have backups over 48 hours, so can’t contact all the emergency duty officers.

 

Not sure we have to worry about an invading army, just cut the power and let civil unrest do the job, then come in offering help and support if you join our gang.....

[V]

4 hours ago, neal said:

Back to my office and the 48 hours of fuel, the question then is how do we refuel with no electricity. The fuel tanks are all electric pumps, so need to resolve that one. All the phones are now down as the masts are unlikely to have backups over 48 hours, so can’t contact all the emergency duty officers.

That's very much here and now but after 2030 internal combustion generators, lawn mowers, chain saws are all going to be on their way out or already gone. Oil and coal are always going to be needed for plastics, synthetic rubber and steel but I think refineries will be shut down. Scarcity usually drives up the price of commodities. If vehicles are no longer refuelling on petrol or diesel then the cost of using those fuels for non vehicular purposes is going to increase. I think there will be a quick shift to battery power for tools that previously had small internal combustion engines when their operating costs become prohibitively expensive. Generators unfortunately will become casualties like our favourite cars. Hydrogen or some low cost non-toxic synthetic fuel will have to become commonplace within the next seven years to generators possible again.

[V]

5 hours ago, neal said:

Not sure we have to worry about an invading army, just cut the power and let civil unrest do the job, then come in offering help and support if you join our gang.

I agree. I think the majority of the population will become turncoats.

[V]

15 hours ago, UKTJ said:

I think how vehicles are powered will be irrelevant if the bomb drops.

Every nuclear explosion comes with a cost we all share. When I was a kid the chance of getting cancer during your lifetime was 1 in 5, now it is down to 1 in 2. Since 1945 we have had 2059 nuclear explosions, averaging 2 per month. I guess like lots of things today there is nothing to link global cancer increases with nuclear bomb tests. I hope that the radioactive fallout from a nuclear attack and subsequent retaliation would be forefront in the mind of the person making the launch decision.

 

I think that it is plausible that a tactical nuclear weapon was used in 1943 against the Soviet Union during the Kursk offensive. The use of tactical nuclear weapons of a small size on a battlefield are more of a risk today than the total annihilation weapons I was terrified of when I was at school.

[jerryg]

1 hour ago, V said:

I hope that the radioactive fallout from a nuclear attack and subsequent retaliation would be forefront in the mind of the person making the launch decision.

Megalomaniacs, terrorists and the deranged don't think about the consequences of their deluded actions.

[jerryg]

Neal - 'The impact of 3 hours is considerable, but just think what 3 days off the grid would do for society.'

 

Those of a certain age will remember the 70's and the rota disconnections imposed as a result of industrial action. National Grid in conjunction with HM Gov and other interested bodies will have a detailed plan worked out which will be communicated to the general public in advance of any cuts. 3 hours off during peak times is no big deal with advance notice.  The contents of freezers and fridges will survive.

It will never be off for 3 days at a stretch. I think this comment has been taken out of context - it probably means cuts may last for 3 consecutive days in 3 hour slots but not 3 days solid?

Journalists by their very nature exaggerate, get the facts wrong or just like to scaremonger!

Either way I will wait until I get a genuine communication from my supplier or HM Gov. 

In the meantime have a gander at  https://gridwatch.co.uk/  to keep a watch on demand and generation in the UK. 

 

[UKTJ]

4 hours ago, V said:

...The use of tactical nuclear weapons of a small size on a battlefield are more of a risk today than the total annihilation weapons I was terrified of when I was at school.

It seems that those who set The Doomsday Clock would disagree.  At 100 seconds to midnight they believe we are closer to global nuclear catastrophe that at any time since 1947.

[JimC]

As there is no alternatives yet to aviation transport then there will be the need for this until a viable alternative comes along.

 

[Ludders]

I'm gambling on synthetic fuels... 

[Gerald F]

9 hours ago, V said:

When I was a kid the chance of getting cancer during your lifetime was 1 in 5, now it is down to 1 in 2.

There are more cogent explanations for the increase in cancer rates; in particular, people are living much longer, and are also failing to die from infections and cardiovascular diseases as often – and as young – as previous generations. Cancer is also much more common amongst the elderly, so is more common at the time of death, and has often been diagnosed – due to better tests –  even when it is not the cause of death. 

Experience following accidents at Seascale, Dounreay, Chernobyl and Fukushima have produced lower rates of cancer than data from Japan and  the Pacific above-ground tests suggested. Whilst there is still a real effect, it accounts for only a small proportion of the changes in rates of cancer.

As for the Nazis having tactical nuclear weapons in use in 1943, it is difficult to see how they could have lost if that were true. More worryingly, Putin does have such devices, and may be sufficiently deranged as actually to use them. If that starts off, cancer will not be our greatest worry. I think my diesel engined Jeep may be the vehicle of choice in that circumstance, if I can hoard a supply of fuel.

Edited October 30, 2022 by Gerald F

[Raakhee]

Wow @V that's a bleak future. Whilst the rest of the everyday consumer is moving to electronic don't for 1 second believe that the military are doing the same. They probably have a stock of petrol and diesel to see out a war or the means to produce when needed. 

[V]

2 hours ago, Gerald F said:

As for the Nazis having tactical nuclear weapons in use in 1943, it is difficult to see how they could have lost if that were true.

I don't have a link for it any more, but did have info on the suspected first nuclear test on a German island off their northern coast that knocked out all nearby telephone communications for over a week. I believe they were the first to prove that a nuclear weapon was possible long before the allies had got close to a prototype. If this was not the case there would have been no heroes of Telemark.

 

They also had developed submarine towable submerged launch platforms for the V2. Nobody is ever going to know the truth, but one of the reasons suspected for the Japanese failure to surrender was that they were expecting nuclear weapon materials to arrive from the nazis. Some years ago I read some intriguing story about the missing inventories of captured U-boats on their way to Japan during 1945. Perhaps operation Paperclip also included captured nuclear specialists onboard those submarines. Have you ever wondered why the allies dropped two different atomic weapons on Japan without conducting a drop test? Perhaps they already knew that it worked. It would have been extremely stupid to drop the bomb on Japan for it not to go off.

 

I think the outcome of the second world war was on a knife edge. If the nazis had nuked New York in 1944, maybe they could have forced the Americans to withdraw, but not the Soviets. The Japanese already had an atomic weapons program. Shipping nazi V2 technology and uranium to Japan or perhaps to facilities in Japanese occupied Korea, would enable the Japanese to stop the Soviet advance into Germany. The Japanese had a submarine capable of launching a V1 at sea, but the V1 was slow, inaccurate and could be intercepted. The submerged V2 launch platform would likely have changed the outcome if not for the code breakers at Bletchley Park.

 

As the Americans did not share the atomic bomb with the Soviets, the Soviets still managed to absorb plenty of captured specialists and perhaps physical technology to produce a weapon that was strangely similar to both 'Fat Man' and the nazi prototype bomb. Interestingly, the Japanese could produce enough heavy water from their facilities in Korea after Telemark was destroyed. Perhaps the 'Wonder Weapons' Adolf was waiting for were Japanese. Always wondered why Japan was allowed to have nuclear power stations after the second world war.

Edited October 31, 2022 by V

[V]

15 hours ago, Raakhee said:

Whilst the rest of the everyday consumer is moving to electronic don't for 1 second believe that the military are doing the same. They probably have a stock of petrol and diesel to see out a war or the means to produce when needed.

I reckon so too. But for how long will that be sustainable? Between the 1950's and 1970's a number of British made fighting vehicles used engines locally made by Jaguar or Leyland. If there are no diesel engines being manufactured in the UK or the EU in the next decade then the British armed forces will be dependent on those foreign manufacturers that are still making them.