Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Second sitting)

Scott Mann Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 31st October 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Kerr]

Q You do not see legislation playing a part in this?

Robert Evans: At this stage I would say that was not necessary.

[Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)]

Q A couple of my questions have already been answered. One was on the car-to-grid technology and the other one was on peak capacity. I want to ask the National Grid this: does your grid mirror some of the main arterial roads that run through the country? How effectively could you put your grid capacity into locations? I am firmly of the view that we should not necessarily assume that we want all the charging points to be in current service stations—there might be opportunities outside the existing ones—so how easy will it be for you to deliver that with your current grid locations?

Marcus Stewart: The high voltage network does mirror parts of the motorway network, but not all of it. There will be locations where there is a clear opportunity to build a connection for high voltage to supply charging, and there will be other locations where it is just not that simple. It has to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Some of the options around that are maybe connecting at a lower voltage tier but using onsite storage, so you are not taking too much stress from the grid in one go. You are managing exactly the same as a petrol station does today, where it fills up a tank of petrol under the ground and feeds it to the cars as they need it.

We have talked to different developers and people who are looking at those kinds of options, and we describe it as a sort of mosaic of different charging routes out there. One of them could be high voltage input, with 350 kV of charging, backed up with a megawatt-scale battery to minimise the connection to the grid and that impact.

[Scott Mann]

Q I have one small supplementary question, if I may. Do you see yourselves as being an end-to-end provider or do you see other companies coming in to fill that middle gap?

Marcus Stewart: From a national grid point of view, my role is to balance the network and ensure that the energy is balanced. We have a transmission owner part that would own the high voltage network, and certainly the element up to a connection. Anything beyond the connection is available for third party competition. Any service provider could put that in. A deregulated version of the National Grid or another third party could put that in. Our primary role is the reinforcement element upstream to support that.

[Mr Hayes]

Q On the back of that, between you there is immense expertise in managing complex systems—I have read your CVs. On the issue of grid management, earlier today we heard a call for some kind of co-ordinated approach on where charge points were located to ensure their spread, and to ensure that there were no areas that would become black holes where there were not enough charging points. Presumably, any such co-ordinated plan would need to be married to the supply of electricity via the grid. The Bill does not yet do this. It is a first step down this road, and it simply increases the number of charging points. Do you see the sense of putting together a co-ordinated national strategy that ties together the provision of the charging points with the provision of the power?

Marcus Stewart: I think it would have some merits. I am not sure whether it needs to be mandated or not.