It's going to be the biggest change in generations.
The homes we live in
and the cars we drive -
all transformed.
To slow down climate change,
Government has promised a green revolution -
a carbon-neutral, net-zero future by 2050.
Are we going to make it?
Deadlines always move, right? But it's good to have goals.
I'm on my way to meet some people who think they have the answer.
There are all sorts of targets to cut CO2 emissions,
but are they remotely realistic?
To find out, Michelle Ackley investigates what it all means
for our everyday lives.
This is an £18,000 installation.
18? Yeah.
That is a huge amount of money.
Dr Tara Shine reveals the huge scientific challenges.
It's terrifying to think that there are cracks in the reactor.
Wahey!
You all right? Oh, yes.
I'll be putting the questions
to the people who are supposed to be making this happen.
The National Grid simply isn't fit for purpose.
In this episode, deep inside the electric car revolution.
It's like a charging heaven.
Whoa!
Really goes. Everyone who says electric cars are boring
needs to come and drive one of these.
I've been told that this place is home
to one of the most promising
green technology projects in Britain.
I think it's just round the corner here.
Here in a quiet corner of Mid-Wales...
..could lie the future of the car.
So this is not what I was expecting.
It's a VW Beetle.
You must be Justin. I am. How's it going?
Good to meet you. You're Moggy, yeah? I am Moggy, indeed I am.
Richard Morgan, aka Moggy, is a man on an electric mission.
I was told to expect the future of driving.
And this must be... This is more like Back To The Future here.
You can see the history and the future of transportation.
The best way to experience it
is to probably get in the driver's seat and have a drive of it.
OK. So pop yourself in there.
OK. So...
Ignition on.
And then...D for drive.
D for drive.
Handbrake off, and very gently accelerate.
We haven't yet put it through its paces, have we? No.
When you feel like you can, you can floor it.
Wahey!
Oh!
All right, that's enough.
It's good, isn't it?
That is really good.
That is really good. Anyone who says electric cars are boring
needs to come and drive one of these. No, they absolutely do.
The power delivery is just awesome.
Moggy is no environmental campaigner.
He just thinks electric cars are better.
So I did the British Historic Rally Championships seven years
in an old Porsche, so I completely understand the noise, the drama,
the gears, the revs.
I was a massive petrolhead.
And then I drove it for the first time.
Within seconds petrol was dead to me because I went on the road,
put my foot down and, "Whoa!
"Where's this power been all my life?"
Never looked back since.
Moggy now runs a business converting these glorious classic cars
to make them electric.
So, Moggy, this is your workshop, and you've got some classic cars.
That's an Aston Martin, yeah? Correct.
We've got a Porsche.
I would say Ferrari, but that's a Maserati?
You know your cars, well done, mate, yeah.
I mean, I'm a classic car nut - that should be said from the start.
And if I didn't feel we're improving them by converting them to electric,
I wouldn't be doing it.
I love classic cars too much.
I'm convincing you now. I can see you nodding and smiling.
Taking out these huge gas-guzzling supercar engines...
..and replacing them with electric motors
actually, amazingly, makes them more powerful.
This is a heavy lump.
You're talking about 650 kilos of weight just there alone.
Two-thirds of a tonne. Including the fuel, yeah.
A heavy engine wastes energy to move it around.
So here we have the electric motor
that's going to be going in that Land Rover.
So this replaces all of that gubbins? Correct.
The engine, the exhaust, gearbox is a much, much simpler animal.
This motor only weighs 45kg, a fraction of the original engine.
But the weight isn't the only reason electric motors
improve the performance of Moggy's cars.
ENGINE REVS
Oh, look at the smoke!
That's a soul escaping, that is, Justin.
So all this is inefficiency.
The noise, that's wasted energy,
the heat that's coming out of the exhaust, wasted energy,
the heat coming out of the radiator, wasted energy.
The efficiency is as low as 30 to 35% for a modern diesel engine.
Now, a petrol engine's even worse.
It's only 20% of the energy that goes into the engine
is turned into motion.
ENGINE STOPS Oh.
Petrol engines use small explosions to drive pistons.
These turn a crankshaft
to ultimately make the wheels go round.
An electric motor has far fewer moving parts.
It uses electricity to induce magnetic fields
which generate rotational movement, powering the wheels.
Looking through here, I can see the copper coil.
So the power goes in here,
generates an electric current which creates a magnetic field.
Correct. Which pushes the rotor... Really, really fast.
You've got maximum oomph straight away.
It's like flicking a switch.
And that's why electric cars accelerate so fast.
Cos all the power straight from there into the wheels,
onto the road. Straight into rotation.
As well as being fast to get going,
almost none of the electricity powering the motor is wasted.
An electric motor is anything from 90 to 96% efficient
in turning that energy into motion.
If Moggy is right, electric cars are surely the future of motoring.
They are quiet, efficient and non-polluting.
But most importantly, they are part of the solution
to the biggest problem of our era - climate change.
I believe that we have a moral duty to leave this world
in a better condition than what we inherited.
Four years ago, the Government committed the UK
to become net zero by 2050.
Even the definition of net zero is controversial,
but broadly it means that as a country, on balance,
we won't emit any additional greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
At the moment, one quarter of our carbon emissions
are created by cars and transport.
Though it's greener not to drive at all,
when it comes to cars, most people believe the best solution
is electric vehicles, also known as EVs.
They have a surprisingly long history,
from the first electric vehicles in the early 1900s...
..to the Moon Rover in 1971.
But the problem has always been range.
The batteries weren't up to much,
which meant electric cars were always...
..experimental.
The invention of the powerful lithium ion battery
changed everything.
First came the hybrids - part electric, part petrol -
which were all about fuel efficiency,
until fully electric vehicles finally became sexy.
Our goal is to get to cars that everyone can afford
as soon as possible.
Now electric cars are mainstream,
with ten million of them sold worldwide last year.
Reports suggest that a Tesla has become the best-selling car
in the world in 2023.
HORNS BLARE
Two years ago, the UK Government finally decided to make the leap
out of the petrol era and announced that all new petrol and diesel cars
would be banned by 2030,
though you will still be able to buy them second-hand.
The plans include £620-million grants
for electric cars and charging points.
Of course, electric cars are a lot greener
if the electricity they use
is generated wholly from renewable sources.
But that is a story for the second part of this series.
And however exciting they are to drive,
electric cars have some significant drawbacks,
as Moggy was happy to show me.
So these are Tesla batteries, of which there's 16 of these... 16!
..in a Tesla Model S. Now, looking at it, it actually looks like
lots of batteries lined up in rows. That's all it is.
Can I see how much they weigh? Go on, then. They're quite heavy.
So how much is that? That is very heavy.
That's about 25 kilos just in that. 25 kilos each? Yeah.
And that is the rub with electric cars.
It's about the same energy in there as one litre of petrol.
So that is the key challenge for electric vehicles.
You've got to pack a lot of these in to get anywhere near
what you get out of a tank of petrol. Correct.
And that's why electric cars don't go as far.
Otherwise they'd be really, really heavy.
And how much would that cost, one of these?
Second-hand, roughly around about £1,000. £1,000 each?
And you need 16 of them. So they're expensive, and they're heavy.
So that's 16 grand minimum? Correct. For a Tesla? Yeah.
So here's the problem.
The top-selling electric cars are mainly pricey premium vehicles.
But even mass-market models with a decent range
start at around £30,000 - up to a third more than conventional cars.
Electric cars are cheaper to run,
but their high price means that many people simply can't afford them.
Well, it's been amazing to spend some time with Moggy in Wales,
and that VW Beetle that he's built is absolutely incredible.
The performance is amazing,
and that's what's so persuasive about EVs.
But the problem is, of course, the batteries.
So much more work needs to be done on those.
Batteries are expensive.
They are keeping the cost of EVs high.
I've come to the University of Warwick to find out why.
People have always assumed that as production increases,
the cost of electric cars will come down.
But is that true?
I'm meeting two battery experts... Hi, Mel.
..to find out what drives these costs.
What actually is in a battery?
When you unravel it, inside,
you've got many alternating layers.
So on one side you've got a layer coated onto copper,
which is the negative electrode,
and in the other electrode you have aluminium.
So it's of the similar thickness of a human hair.
Wow. In the negative electrode printed on copper,
you have graphite. OK. And then in
the positive electrode printed on aluminium,
that's where you have things like nickel, cobalt, manganese.
So then this is a lithium ion battery.
So why is lithium so well-suited to playing this role?
Lithium is a tiny atom, so it can fit inside other materials.
It also gives up an electron really easily,
so it's easy to harness its energy,
and it's a very energy-dense material, so it's perfect
for charge-carrying in a battery.
They are literally electrifying the world.
So Jess, I believe you can tell me a little bit more about the metals
and where they come from.
Where would I find some lithium in the world, then?
So lithium is primarily being mined from two main sources.
You've either got your hard rock
or your other main source is salty brine like sea water.
The brine has really high concentrations of lithium in it
in certain parts of the world.
It's still primarily Australia for the hard rock
and then the South American countries that are responsible for
a lot of the brine extraction.
Globally, we produce about a million tonnes of lithium materials a year.
At current rates of growth, by 2030, that is predicted to rise
to just 2.5 million tonnes.
But with tens of millions of new electric vehicles on the road
by then, some experts predict we'll need over five million tonnes
of lithium - twice as much as we can produce.
So if we're going to make cars, EVs, in the future,
we're going to need a lot of lithium.
So is there enough out there?
Lithium isn't a rare element.
It's really common.
But the shortage or the issues that we have in the supply chain
come from the fact that we don't have enough mines
or refining capacity at the moment
to just meet the sheer demand that there is.
That demand means prices can fluctuate wildly.
Between September 2020 and January 2023,
the cost of lithium went up by over 1,000%.
It's fallen back a bit now,
but the massive increase in global demand can't be good news
for the price of electric cars.
So, nickel. Now there's something that I've heard about recently
as being expensive?
Russia is a pretty important producer of nickel,
and that supply has really been curtailed.
And that's had a big impact on nickel prices.
So last year it spiked at about $40 for a kilogram.
One of the biggest components is graphite,
like what's used in pencil lead.
But electric vehicles require a very pure version.
Graphite is very plentiful.
The challenges around graphite are more of a geopolitical challenge.
China has traditionally been a very big producer
of both synthetic and natural types of graphite,
and it's also really the base, the hub for graphite processing,
for the use in the anode.
The war in Ukraine has shown how geopolitics
can cause huge shock waves in the price of energy and raw materials.
Currently, China processes over 60% of the world's lithium
and 70% of the graphite,
producing 80% of the world's batteries themselves.
Any conflict involving China
could impact the cost and supply of electric cars.
Are we going to be able to find enough materials to make the number
of EV batteries that we need to make to get to net zero by 2050?
What our numbers indicate
is that the market is going to fall short.
There isn't going to be enough raw material to meet demand.
The fact that it takes 10 to 15 years to start a new mine,
if we want to be getting material for batteries,
we need to start planning those mines now.
So it's really urgent that this is addressed.
Cylindrical batteries like these
lie at the heart of electrifying the transport system.
As we've seen, making them is a complicated process.
It requires precision engineering
and relies on unreliable and expensive supply chains.
We are going to need billions of lithium ion batteries every year
in the UK alone.
So should the world be betting the future of motoring
on such uncertainty?
Hi, Chris. How are you doing? Good to see you.
Chris Stark is the CEO of the Climate Change Committee,
set up by the Government to offer independent expert advice
on its climate goals.
The committee was instrumental in getting the Government
to adopt those targets in the first place.
OK? Good to go? Right.
So what is at stake here?
Well, there's lots at stake. So the top issue is the climate.
We need not just the UK to hit net zero,
we need every country to hit net zero.
And, remember, until that happens, the world keeps warming.
So the key thing when it comes to electric vehicles
is they have to become mass-market.
But there is another big hurdle, and that is
these cars are very expensive.
Yeah. Supply chain costs have gone up.
That's very, very linked to what's happening with
the Russian invasion of Ukraine and overall energy prices.
We have to see cheaper vehicles.
We have to see a second-hand market as well. That's all coming.
I think it's OK at the moment for these vehicles
still to be expensive, to be a premium product.
But it won't happen en masse until we can actually say confidently
that this is a car you can drive that is more cheap to run
and equivalent cost price to purchase.
And I'm confident that'll come.
But of course, fine for me to say that -
the general public needs to feel that way too.
For the transition to electric cars to work,
people need to want to buy them.
Apart from the cost, the other main reason people give
for not going electric is fears about charging.
I've been driving an electric car for a few years now
and I've got a charging point at home,
which means I can stick it on charge overnight,
and for those shorter journeys into town and back,
I'm not worrying about having to recharge.
Gone are the days of nipping to the petrol station
to fill up with fuel.
And when you think that two-thirds of households
actually have off-street parking,
having an electric car actually fits into our lifestyles really well.
If you can't charge in your drive or garage,
you're going to need to charge on the street or on a forecourt.
And because charging can take so long, you need that charger
to be near your house.
Which means we need hundreds of thousands of public chargers
spread around the country, especially in cities.
There are currently around 44,000 public chargers in the UK.
It sounds like a lot, but a third of them are in London.
If you take Westminster, there are more chargers there
than there are in cities like my hometown of Manchester,
Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle combined.
And this problem is not getting any better.
In 2020, there were 16 cars for every public charger.
Now it's estimated to be 32.
This is the BMW...
If sales of electric cars continue to outpace the number of chargers,
this can only get worse.
Central government does not co-ordinate installation.
Instead, dozens of private companies apply for licences
from different councils around the country.
Mark Constable works for one of them - Trojan Energy.
Hi. How are you doing? Hi, Michelle, how you doing?
Nice to meet you. Yeah, very good, thank you.
It's all happening, isn't it? It is.
We've got 34 of these streets dotted around the borough at the moment
where we're installing about 500 charge points in total.
There's 15 going in on this street.
The challenge charging companies face is huge.
In the next ten years, we've got to deliver ten times the amount
of infrastructure that's been delivered in the last ten years.
Is that realistic? Do you think that can happen?
I think it can happen, but I think
there are some things that need to be clarified.
All of the councils in the UK are kind of having to work through
a set of rules and regulations that weren't designed
for this type of works in mind.
This is a brand-new challenge for the council.
If you wanted to replicate this whole process
a bit further down the road, would you have to
start from scratch again? Yeah. Yeah, we would.
Roughly how long could it take, then?
Up to a year, possibly even more than a year between, you know,
presenting an idea to a council and having them decide upon
whether they want to go ahead with it or not.
It certainly doesn't help with the target if it's going to take a year
to a couple of years for every council to make a decision.
That's a long old process.
Each of these installation companies has its own system.
Trojan has gone for a novel approach.
So, Michelle, this is what we call the lance.
It's a lightweight metal tube with a standard EV charging cable.
Customers are issued with their own connector
that can hook into electric cables under the street.
If you point the cable towards the road... Yeah.
..and hover the lance so that the bottom
lines up with the steel disc on the charge point.
Do I have to press it? Oh, I've pressed it down...
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Now press it all the way down.
Oh, it's stuck. Yeah. That's good.
So the light's turned blue. Yeah. So that's in. OK.
There you go. So all I need to do is just plug this in?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's it.
And now charging should just start.
So you can see the charging icon has popped up on the dashboard.
Currently, installers are putting in
a record 2,000 chargers a month into the ground.
The rate of installation needs to increase,
or by 2030 there'll be a 100,000 shortfall
from the Government target of 300,000.
So what are the bottlenecks?
The challenge is that there are round about 200
local authorities in the UK.
That's 200 sets of people
that we have to demonstrate the technology to,
prove that it's safe, prove that it's not a risk to anyone.
Planning permission, permission from the council to dig the holes
and actually install the equipment to actually do the work.
And then some councils also want us to have a Section 115 permit,
which is effectively a licence to make money
from the public highway.
And we need one permit for every set of charge points we put in.
If we want to install 500 charge points, in some cases
it's 500 licences. Wow.
That doesn't seem like a very streamlined approach to me, Mark.
The Government says it has told local authorities
they have to develop their own plans for putting in chargers.
So while most people can charge at home,
there are big regional disparities in the number of charging points.
It acknowledges that planning issues can be complex.
But the Government says the rate of installation IS going up.
That's crucial, because if the charging network
doesn't keep up with demand,
it could undermine the transition to electric vehicles.
I talk to loads of people about electric vehicles
and there's still a really strong perception
that they're just more trouble than they're worth.
I had to try six times
with a pre-authorisation of £50 a time.
The further out you go, there aren't always charging stations.
I do understand why lots of people are anxious about things like range
and where they're going to charge and how much it's all going to cost
and what happens to the battery.
But those perceptions have to be dealt with
if we're going to make this big switchover
that the Government wants.
Surveys show the majority of people who own electric vehicles
are broadly happy with them.
The trouble is, one person's bad experience
makes a much better story than thousands of satisfied customers.
Hey, Giles, how are you doing? All right. Good to see you.
Is this one of your favourites? Yeah, yeah.
Giles Coren is a broadcaster, a newspaper columnist,
and an early adopter of electric vehicles.
My wife had been saying, because of all these journeys, really,
that we'd had, "One more and we've had it - none of your eco nonsense."
And this was the time.
This year, Giles wrote a column for The Times
saying he'd had such an awful time with his electric car
that he was going to hand it back.
Let's cut to the chase. You didn't like it. I think
Times readers, delighted to hear
that I'd had this terrible experience with it.
It really was my most commented-on column.
Be honest. I mean, you're a columnist.
It's your job to have opinions.
Were you fair to electric cars? Absolutely.
So they say you've got, with the seven-kilowatt-hour
off-street parking thing, it'll charge in ten hours overnight.
I don't know whether it's true cos I don't have off-street parking,
cos I'm not a billionaire, and only rich people
have off-street parking in a city. I mean, I do all right,
but I live in a terraced Victorian house, and you know,
I had to run cables across the pavement - illegal.
Although the range of electric vehicles is increasing,
for Giles, the real problem with his car came
when he needed to go on a long journey.
I should be able to take this car across the country without worry,
but I can't, because there aren't enough charging facilities
across the country.
Attempting to get from Littlehampton on the south coast
home to Tunbridge Wells,
seven chargers were not working.
There's basically only a few places you can actually get charging
and then half the time they're full up.
So you have to either wait for, like, 30 minutes or even longer...
We go on holiday in, like, Wales and Devon cos we're eco people,
we decided we won't fly any more.
You pull into a service station and they're all broken.
And then you go on to the next one, Exeter, that's got ten chargers,
but it's got 40 people waiting.
Do you stay? Do you wait? How long will it be?
After queuing for three hours
with all the other furious electric car owners,
just looking over at the people at the petrol ones
just going "glug, glug, glug", and they're on - so jealous of them.
People in rusty old bangers filling up with diesel.
"We've had it, we're going back to petrol."
Obviously there is still a shortage of chargers, but that will change,
Giles, as they invest in the new technology.
If they do, absolutely marvellous.
Then I'll buy another one, and I'll come back to it. It's brilliant.
We obviously have to change. We have to get to net zero, we have to save
the planet. 2030 was a really good idea.
But it's overoptimistic. It cannot be done with the infrastructure
that exists now, the pace, even if we accelerate that we're going now,
and the cars that we have, we will have a better chance of making it
if we go back to horses. Horses?
Well, that was really interesting.
But Giles is a columnist.
It's his job to have strong opinions, and I'm not sure
that electric vehicles are anywhere near as bad as he says.
But here's the thing.
If people think they are,
that is a huge problem for the industry.
So what's stopping us simply building loads
of high speed chargers to replace garages
and service stations around the country?
I travel to Braintree in Essex for a vision
of a clean, electric future.
Oh, wow.
Look at all these spaces.
It's like a charging heaven.
Step one, plug in your vehicle.
That's easy enough.
Tap contactless cards or device.
Card accepted, starting. That is it.
Time for a coffee.
This is Britain's very first electric forecourt.
Well, this looks very smart.
As far as a service station goes, you've got everything
you need here.
Grab a coffee.
Shop.
There's even a post office.
This site is owned and operated by Gridserve.
Toddington, hello. Nice to meet you.
Toddington Harper is the founder and CEO.
So we have 36 chargers at this location and it's designed
to make driving and charging electric cars just as easy
as a petrol and diesel car, but actually
with a much better experience.
He's also trying to address another great concern.
How long the charging takes.
Because when you're on a long journey, you don't want
to be hanging around.
One thing that I've definitely noticed, driving an electric car,
when I'm charging, I want a rapid charger.
It's so important.
At home, charging your car takes around eight hours.
Here, they can take as little as 40 minutes.
They even have a state of the art ultra-fast charger that can charge
a car in less than 15 minutes.
Theoretically.
The only problem is my car can't take it yet.
In fact, there aren't many that can.
350 kilowatts is a future-proofed charger.
In probably two or three years, there are cars that will be able
to take that level of power.
But there's another bigger problem.
This charging station is on an A-road in Essex.
Great if you're travelling between Bishop's Stortford and Colchester.
But why not put it on the much busier M11 just 15 miles away?
On the right-hand side,
that's the connection to the National Grid.
Part of the answer is that you need a huge electricity supply.
So this is a five-megawatt grid connection, which can produce
enough energy every hour for around 20,000 miles of EV charging.
Right.
Even with this high-voltage connection, he's still had to build
what looks like a mini power station.
These containers, they're actually all full of batteries.
They're stabilising the grid. And here we have the transformers.
And this is a crucial problem.
Toddington is upgrading motorway chargers, too, but the grid
doesn't always have the capacity to supply the power
his ultra-fast chargers need.
So the grid connections were actually only designed
for 50 kilowatts, so we upgraded them all with brand-new chargers
that actually are capable of providing up to 120
or 180 kilowatts, but limited by that grid connection.
So we have to get new grid connections in.
That takes a lot of effort, a lot of time.
You've got to negotiate a lot
of different agreements, and that's the single thing that will delay us
getting a site in place.
The Government thinks we need 6,000 ultra-fast chargers
on the country's major roads and motorways by 2035.
But this is currently a long way off.
For instance, this is one of the busiest services on the M1.
Unbelievably, it only has two fast chargers on each carriageway.
Are we going to make it? The quicker we can get them
in the ground, the quicker we'll be able to give everyone
the confidence that now is the time, not tomorrow, not the day after,
but today, to go and get an electric vehicle.
The Government has said that the market is best placed
to identify the right sites for charging points, and has left it
up to private companies like Gridserve and Trojan.
National Grid admits significant network upgrades are needed to meet
the power needs for these rapid-charging hubs.
They say they are working hard to meet this increased demand,
but have called for an overhaul in the planning laws in order
to meet the challenge.
The Government has set these targets for the introduction of EVs.
And then this cliff edge, where the sale of non-electric vehicles
is going to be banned. And then, it appears to just leave it
to the private companies to kind of make the arrangements.
Is that sufficient? No, it's not sufficient.
And to give the Government some credit, they do have a plan
to increase the number of public chargers that we have
in this country quite significantly.
But it's quite difficult to know how that plan
will be delivered. Planning does make it really difficult.
And we don't have a planning system that's set up for net zero
in the round. This is one of the challenges.
Why on earth isn't it happening, cos we've got the targets there?
So the targets are there.
But what we don't have is a government that's put its shoulder
to the wheel on it. It feels like a target that's being thrust upon
the Government that implemented the target.
So we need to be enthusiastic about this change that's coming.
It is going to be better for this country for us
to drive electric vehicles.
The thing that's holding it up is the fact that we need
a charging network that's in place and fit for purpose.
The Government says its strategic framework will accelerate
the roll-out of high-powered chargers through their £950 million
Rapid Charging Fund.
At best, it feels like it's going to be a rocky road to replace
30 million cars with electric vehicles.
But is there an alternative,
a different technology that could smooth this transition
while staying sustainable?
Look at this.
Wow. It is beautiful.
Oh! Am I really going to do this?
Am I going to get in?
I think I will.
Hi, Paddy. I'm Tara. Hi, Tara. Great to meet you.
Oh, my God, it feels so fast, doesn't it?
Like, the car is so low to the ground and everything.
Yeah, I think that's the nice part about it, yeah.
SHE SQUEALS WITH DELIGHT
This feels - like, this feels fast. Very fast.
How many are we going? Like, 70mph.
Woo!
Run out of road. Whoa!
Paddy Lowe, former executive director
at the Mercedes Formula 1 team, is trying to convince me
that this car is actually green.
We are driving guilt-free... Guilt-free.
..from the point of view of the fuel.
Oh, I don't believe you! I don't believe you.
You'll have prove it to me. We'll go to the lab and show you
how it's done. OK, OK, great. Thank you.
This beautiful vintage 1968 E-Type Jag
runs on petrol.
But it is actually synthetic petrol.
His team used advanced chemistry to make the petrol out of hydrogen
from water, and carbon dioxide from the air.
So you've made this petrol out of thin air?
Exactly. Air and water. Air and water.
Can you tell me more about how you make it?
Let's walk over here. So these are hydrogen electrolysers.
First of all, need to make hydrogen.
So, you put in water, which is H2O.
Yeah. And you split it out, you split out the O, the O2, oxygen.
Yeah. It comes out there.
And the hydrogen. And then, the next component we need is?
Then we need carbon.
We're trying to capture that from the atmosphere.
How do you do that? You have to pump a huge amount of air through
an absorbent, which picks up the carbon dioxide.
You've made hydrogen - here in this building - and carbon.
Yeah. So what turns those two gases into synthetic fuels?
We're going to conduct a process called Fischer-Tropsch.
Essentially, Fischer-Tropsch is the combination of hydrogen
and carbon to create hydrocarbons.
This process has actually been known about for over 100 years.
The Germans used it during the Second World War.
But with vast supplies of oil available to us, there hasn't
been much call for it until now.
In essence, when we use this fuel and burn it,
we still release carbon dioxide.
So in that way, how is it a solution to climate change?
When you burn this fuel, you put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But when I make the fuel again, I reabsorb that.
So it's completely balanced.
Can this compete, in terms of cost, with fossil hydrocarbons? Yes.
And what does it cost right now? It will be perhaps six, seven times
the price of fossil fuel.
This is the answer, and we just have to work at it to drive down cost.
Synthetic petrol does sound attractive,
but it's hugely expensive,
still produces pollutants,
and needs massive amounts of electricity to manufacture.
So it may not play a major role in the net zero future of driving.
Now, this is a more everyday option,
and it runs on an entirely different kind of fuel.
Hi, Claire. Hi, there. Tell me, what is this?
So this is a hydrogen-powered car.
It's a little bit like a battery electric car in that it has
an electric drive train and has zero emissions.
Only instead of being powered by a battery, it's powered
by a hydrogen fuel cell. So can I see this fuel cell?
Can we take a look? Absolutely. Let's have a look, shall we?
So there it is.
So this is where normally you'd find
the sort of internal combustion engine in a car.
But here we've got a fuel cell, which is much,
much more exciting.
The way that this works is it takes oxygen,
sucks it in from the air, takes hydrogen from the fuel tanks,
which are in the back of the car, puts it through
a sort of chemical reaction.
And then out of that comes electricity,
which makes the car go, and water out of the back end.
Only water? Yeah, that's right. The hydrogen, then,
where does it go in? How?
Well, actually, it'll look again, very familiar to you
if you drive a sort of petrol or diesel car,
is it comes through the fuel cap here.
So what you basically do is you clip on the refuelling, you push
the button, it takes three or four minutes to refuel and then I get
about 380 miles out of this. Wow! Mm.
Unlike the E-Type, it drives, well, very ordinarily.
Oh!
Very smooth. Yeah!
Again, it's very similar to the battery cars in that
there's no real noise.
I mean, in terms of driving, it feels like an electric car.
Mm-hm. Yeah, it's exactly the same.
How much does hydrogen cost? Can it be cost-competitive?
At the moment to refuel this car,
it costs about the same as petrol or diesel.
Really? Yeah. Hydrogen's a little bit like where offshore wind
was ten years ago.
And that's why it needs to go through the same journey
that offshore wind went through, where it was supported
by the Government to get cost down and scale up,
to the point where it can be used affordably for a number
of different applications.
What do you think would be the real game-changing
uses of hydrogen, then, particularly in transport, say?
The general rule of thumb is that the larger the vehicle,
the more efficient it is to use hydrogen, and the smaller
the vehicle, the more efficient it is to use batteries.
So the areas where we're really looking to deploy hydrogen,
where hydrogen will be the predominant technology,
are areas like aviation, so the planes, and maritime,
like ships, and lorries
and HGVs, and potentially, trains and double decker buses.
Hydrogen will really play a massive role in decarbonising those parts
of the energy system.
Hydrogen may be the answer for some of our transport needs.
Germany has fleets of trains running on hydrogen.
There are a few hydrogen lorries on our roads already.
But the hydrogen needs to be produced.
And to do that sustainably, you need lots of green electricity.
For most uses, it's way more efficient just to put
that straight into an electric car.
The Government plan to ban petrol and diesel cars
has huge implications, even beyond the way we all get around.
The traditional car industry is worth £14 billion a year
to the British economy.
By 2030, it isn't going to have a market in the UK any more,
unless it goes electric.
Effectively, a whole new industry needs to be created.
But will it stay in Britain?
This place is Ford's famous Dagenham plant, and it was opened way back
in 1931, when this guy, Henry Ford, was still around.
Ford is an American company, but its plant at Dagenham
has been at the heart of the British car industry for nearly 100 years.
They gave up assembling cars here more than 20 years ago.
Instead, they make hundreds of thousands of engines.
Diesel engines.
This huge plant is an important employer.
About 2,000 people work here,
crucial jobs in quite a deprived part of the country.
Two ferries a day depart from here exporting engines
to mainland Europe.
So that lorry's taking on the engines from the plant,
£2 billion worth a year.
It's amazing to watch.
But there is a death sentence hanging over Dagenham.
HORN HONKS
Well, there she goes off to Europe with her cargo of engines
and this electric car revolution that we're in the middle of
is such a huge issue for the car industry.
Such a massive change.
And if we get it wrong, well, it could mean the end of one
of Britain's biggest businesses.
More than 800,000 people work in jobs connected
to the UK car industry.
So it is vital for the UK to ensure it continues to thrive.
The net zero targets should mean new green jobs.
But the problem is the transition is extremely costly.
And the competition is fierce.
Billions of dollars in investment to make electric vehicles and battery
and electric charging stations all across America...
..made in America.
As part of their net zero strategy,
the US government has offered $20 billion in loans and grants
to encourage local electric vehicle manufacturing.
The Chinese government has invested more than $130 billion,
and it started in 2009.
At the moment, our government's net zero industrial strategy
for electric cars is much less ambitious.
Emma Butcher is from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders,
which represents the UK car industry.
The investment that is on offer elsewhere in the world is quite
frankly incredibly attractive.
So it does make companies think twice when they come
to make their investment decisions.
We are at a critical moment in terms of attracting investment to the UK.
If we're not able to attract it here in the next couple of years,
it may well be too late.
In particular, we need to build batteries.
They're the single most valuable part of an electric vehicle.
China has more than 100 large battery or gigafactories.
And Europe is well into double figures.
We have one.
By 2030, if we're going to be producing a million electric cars
here, then we're going to need 60 gigawatt hours of battery production
capacity within the UK in order to produce
a million battery electric vehicles.
How much have we got now?
Today we have two gigawatt hours... So we need 58 more.
We do. We've got, you know, like 3% of what we need and we've got
six-and-a-half years to build 58 gigawatts of capacity.
And without new battery factories,
there's not much incentive for carmakers like Ford
to expand production here either.
We need these batteries.
We're going to need 70,000 skilled people just to make batteries,
produce those gigafactories to make sure that the value
in those batteries comes from the UK.
Two years ago, Britain did have a spectacular plan to kick
start that gigafactory revolution.
A shiny new company called Britishvolt promised to build
a £3.8 billion factory near Blyth in north-east England.
People look back to the Industrial Revolution.
The north-east had an enormous role in that.
We deindustrialised, but now we're re-industrialising.
It would provide batteries for 300,000 cars a year,
more than a third of all the cars we currently produce.
It would also provide 3,000 jobs
and was to be a cornerstone
of the UK's net zero revolution.
But despite all the hype, this gleaming example of net zero
enterprise ended up going disastrously wrong.
The CEO was Orral Nadjari,
a Swedish entrepreneur with no experience
in the battery industry.
We wanted to put UK at the centre of the world
when it came to battery technology. That was so exciting.
The vision was grand.
We put in blood, sweat and tears into this.
Construction started on a huge gigaplant in Northumberland.
Britishvolt started work in August 2021 on what was to be Britain's
fourth largest building.
We hope to be employing nearly 3,000 people on this site,
and it will kick-start this battery economy.
Orral approached the Government for part of the £3.8 billion
it would take to finish the job.
The government offered £100 million.
When Boris Johnson announced in the intent to give the grant
in January, it was fantastic.
One of the criteria to support a industrial, large-scale project
like this is that government incentive.
Is it there? Would the Treasury sign off?
We would have had hundreds of millions from the capital market
following suit.
But that didn't happen.
The Government final sign-off didn't come.
Doubts have emerged about whether Britishvolt was up to the job.
So, £3.8 billion project.
And you're the CEO, right?
You've got no experience in batteries, Orral.
How many people do?
It's a novel industry.
How many people do? In Europe?
Then Liz Truss became Prime Minister.
The financial markets went into a tailspin and Britishvolt
backers pulled their cash.
Britishvolt has collapsed as it struggled to raise enough money
to stay afloat.
The Government also refused to release its money.
It's important that private shareholders, private businesses,
are also investing alongside the taxpayer, cos we want to make
sure that those projects work, that they're good value for money.
Orral left the business in September 2022 and construction was halted.
The UK's gigafactory plans lay in tatters.
So it failed. Yes, it did.
Absolutely devastating.
Heart, soul,
tears went into this project.
Meanwhile, it's been reported that France has offered 1.5 billion euros
in loans to help build four new gigafactories.
And although Germany already has six working gigafactories, it's said
to be offering a billion euros in loans to Northvolt to build more.
Critics claim that Britain's reluctance to put up this kind
of huge investment to attract big companies means we risk falling
behind in the race.
If we are not producing batteries onshore,
then we're going to lose our car industry.
So even if somebody else would start today...
..UK is going to be another two years behind.
The Government has said it is positioning this country as one
of the best places in the world for the electric vehicle industry.
In May this year, it was reported that Jaguar Land Rover,
the Indian-owned carmaker, was planning to open
a battery factory in Somerset
with government backing of half a billion pounds in loans.
But it's estimated the UK would need at least five more gigafactories
to meet demand.
And time is running out.
Electric vehicles represent the biggest change in the car
industry since the Model-T replaced the horse and cart.
Except, of course, this time round,
we've got a decade to do it.
It represents a huge opportunity.
But here in the UK, we've got a hell of a lot of work to do.
With net zero everywhere you look, there is opportunity.
The opportunity to create a clean, modern transport system and green
jobs in the industries of the future.
But there are risks, too.
Realistically, looking at the state of the electric car industry
in the UK now, are we really going to hit the targets, ban the sale
of petrol and diesel cars by 2030?
Seven years might not sound a lot, but it is a lot.
If you look at the numbers already, we're ahead of the paths
that we've drawn for the country.
I just know, Chris, there'll be people watching this going,
"Yeah, you can say...that's easy for you to say that.
"I simply don't believe you.
"I want to buy petrol and diesel cars..." Cos it's a really
dependable, reliable technology.
And I'm entirely happy that people want to continue to buy petrol
and diesel cars. But you're not! You want them to switch to electric!
I want to make the transition, but we've got to be sure
that this thing's ready and cost has got to come down.
The charging network's got to be there, too.
It's difficult at the moment, but I think by the time we get
to 2030, that will not be the case.
At least I hope that will be the case and I can see
a path forward now.
There's no question electric cars are the future.
They're clean, they're quiet and they are great fun to drive.
But whoa! There are so many hurdles in the road.
The cars have got to be a whole lot cheaper.
They've got to be a whole lot easier to charge.
And there is a real question about how many of them will be made
here in the UK.
And there's another issue.
If electric cars are going to help us tackle climate change,
then the electricity that powers them needs
to be a whole lot greener.
This is the home of the future.
Next time...
Heating our homes without gas.
It's massive.
Biggest onshore wind project in England.
We ask, can Britain produce enough green electricity to power
this net zero revolution?
To find out more about the challenges of our journey to net
zero and what you can do to make more of an impact, go to...
..and follow the link to the Open University.
It's going to be the biggest change in generations.
The homes we live in, and the cars we drive -
all transformed.
To slow down climate change,
Government has promised a green revolution - a carbon-neutral,
net-zero future by 2050.
Are we going to make it?
Deadlines always move, right? But it's good to have goals.
I'm on my way to meet some people who think they have the answer.
There are all sorts of targets to cut CO2 emissions,
but are they remotely realistic?
To find out,
Michelle Ackerley investigates what it all means for our everyday lives.
This is an £18,000 installation.
18? Yeah.
That is a huge amount of money.
Dr Tara Shine reveals the huge scientific challenges.
It's terrifying to think that there are cracks in a reactor.
Wahey! You all right?
Oh, yes.
I'll be putting the questions to the people who are supposed
to be making this happen.
The National Grid simply isn't fit for purpose.
In this episode, heating our homes.
It will take more than 400 years before every British home
has a heat pump.
And powering the country.
This reactor has been extended from 2014 to 2026.
None of this is for the benefit of the residents.
None of it's for the benefit of the environment.
Oh!
It is absolutely freezing, minus 12 degrees Centigrade.
Look at the icicles!
Let's get inside.
Oh, it's blissfully warm in here.
Look, the lights come on automatically.
This is the home of the future.
Even the mirror is a radiator.
Go in here, we've got more of that infrared radiation
up here on the ceiling.
The skirting board is actually a radiator and that is not all.
Have a look at this.
There's all sorts of high tech up here.
Listen to this.
ELECTRONIC VOICE: Remember to take your medication.
It even reminds you to look after yourself.
This house of the future
is not quite ready for us to move into, though.
It's actually part of a laboratory to test new net-zero
house-heating technology here at Salford University.
The house is full of the newest heat pumps, heat exchangers, insulation,
infrared radiators and intelligent heating systems.
It's been built inside a huge warehouse so scientists can control
the weather - making it rain, making it snow,
causing heatwaves and cold snaps
all at the touch of a button.
But a part of this vision of the future is a heat pump,
a super-efficient form of heating technology.
Every unit of electricity you put in,
you get up to three units of heat out. Amazing!
But this isn't some vision of a distant future.
The Government plan is that in 12 years' time,
you will not be able to buy a gas boiler any more.
You will have to buy a low-carbon alternative like a heat pump.
Because heat pumps are part of the solution to the biggest
problem of our era...
..climate change.
The clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions
of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines
with which we are pumping carbon
into the air, quilting the earth
in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2.
Four years ago, the Government committed to what's called net zero
by 2050.
Even the definition of net zero is controversial,
but broadly, it means that, as a country, on balance,
we won't emit any additional greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
I believe that we have a moral duty
to leave this world in a better condition than what we inherited.
Currently, gas and oil-fuelled central heating and hot water
account for as much as 14% of the UK's emissions of CO2
into the atmosphere.
Yeah, this is natural gas. Ooh, it's coming higher, isn't it?
Yes, that's right.
These fuels have been heating our homes for years, with gas fires...
Mrs Hudson's fire is one of some 800 different kinds of gas appliances.
..and then by central heating.
Warmth when you want it.
Gas boilers are the perfect heating system,
keeping your frozen hands cosy in the depths of winter.
Now, as part of net zero, the Government intends to ban
the sale of new gas boilers from 2035.
People will be offered £5,000 grants to replace their gas boilers
with heat pumps.
Heat pumps work a bit like a fridge in reverse,
extracting heat from outside and pumping it inside to heat our homes
and hot water.
Current models are three to five times more energy-efficient
than traditional boilers.
Replacing all the UK's boilers with heat pumps could prevent
the release of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases.
So a lot is riding on them.
Around 80% of homes in the UK use gas or oil boilers to heat them.
But, in a few years' time, if your boiler breaks down,
you won't be able to just buy a new one and replace it.
You'll have to opt for a green alternative.
And, as it currently stands, that's most likely
to be an electric heat pump.
The Government has set a target of 600,000 of them installed
every year by 2028, including in every new home from 2025.
And today, one of them is going into this bungalow in Hook in Hampshire.
Hiya! Hello.
All right.
Clearly, er, a lot of work going on out here.
Hello. Hi, Michelle. Come on in. Hello. Nice to meet you. Thank you.
Kenny, when you've got a moment, try and pull these through. Right.
The Obornes took the plunge
as their boiler was nearing the end of its life.
It's going to go any minute.
I'll have that. Yeah.
So you guys have got a lot of work going on inside and outside
the house, it seems.
This isn't all to do with the heat pump, is it? It is.
As part of the install, we need to upgrade the rads.
All of them? Basically, yeah.
This is a big job, isn't it? It's a sizeable job.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
The radiators are just the start of it.
A lot's going to come out.
So, in this cupboard, we have an old hot-water cylinder. Yeah.
That's being removed completely.
The boiler is being taken out.
All of that pipework is changing.
It's going to be routed through from the garage, over the loft,
and then it will drop down into the 250-litre system cylinder.
And an air source pump outside the garage.
Radiators completely replaced throughout the property.
We don't know anybody that's had it done.
It's a leap of faith.
The Government is helping, though.
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland,
they're currently offering a one-off £5,000 heat pump installation grant.
Scotland is more generous.
It's £7,500.
Dare I ask about cost?
You've got the £5,000 grant from the Government. Yeah. Yeah.
Has that covered it? Oh, no. Um, no, no.
I mean, this is an £18,000 installation.
18? Yeah.
That is a huge amount of money. It is. Massive.
It's a far cry from £5,000, isn't it? Yeah.
The heat pump itself does only cost £3,000 to £5,000,
but it's all the other work that adds the expense.
This installation will take a team of six
more than a week to complete.
What size is the heat pump? It's a seven here, right? Seven.
So all of this is in press fit, right? Yeah.
Patrick Wheeler runs the installation company
and is overseeing this work.
Patrick, hello. Hi.
Lots going on today. Lots going on. Talk me through it.
The external unit's just on the other side of that wall.
So we've now fitted our new pipes across the top of the garage here.
This installation really is a significant building project.
Many homes won't need as much work as this, but quite a few will.
So is this an extreme example of a heat pump installation?
I wouldn't call this extreme, no, it's kind of average.
You've got to have the heat pump outside.
You've got to get the pipes and the cables to it.
Many homes will also need extra insulation and even double-glazing
to make the system efficient.
And after all the work and expense,
heat pumps take some getting used to.
You can't just whack up the temperature.
It heats up differently.
Generally, you want to heat up for long periods of time
at a lower temperature, but it still gives the same amount
of power, just over a longer period of time.
So you're not going to be colder? No, you're not going to be colder.
Take-up of heat pumps has so far been painfully slow -
just 60,000 last year,
one of the lowest in Europe,
and miles off the Government's
target of 600,000 per year by 2028.
The Government grant doesn't seem to be helping much.
So far, fewer than 12,000 grants have been cashed,
probably because of the extra costs the consumer still has to pay.
If you had a normal house with not much that needs to be done on it,
especially with insulation, how much do you think it would cost?
Would £5,000 be enough with the grant?
An average cost is in the region of £10,000. £10,000?
Absolutely. It's not available for everybody.
As with all new technologies, it has to start somewhere.
Fortunately, there's more interest in renewables than ever before,
but it is still only available for people that are,
you know, on above-average incomes.
In fact, the Government's grant
is one of the smallest in Europe.
The French offer up to 9,000 euros,
and Germany offer a whopping
15,000 euros
towards gas removal
and heat pump installation.
This year, Octopus Energy and British Gas launched their own
heat pump installation deals, cutting the cost for the consumer
down to just £3,000.
But even that still doesn't include new radiators and insulation.
So, currently, it looks like this green solution
is out of the price range of many households.
And even if we are prepared to break the bank to make this work,
there is another, even bigger barrier
to hitting the Government's heat pump targets.
Are there enough people trained to be able to do it?
Because one of the targets is to have 600,000 heat pumps installed
every year by 2028.
I mean, that's just around the corner. There absolutely isn't.
We've got more people leaving the heating industry than joining,
and there's very few people training.
Being a low-temperature engineer,
you've got to be able to do heat-loss calculations, pipe sizing,
and really understand how it works with a modern control system.
It's estimated that there are currently only 4,000
heat pump installers in the UK,
and that by 2028 we'll need more than 33,000.
Government says they are expanding training, and training facilities,
but it does still feel like 600,000 installations a year
is a distant pipe dream.
Do you think this deadline is realistic?
With the current workforce? No. No, I don't think so.
We're quite far off of that.
And there needs to be a lot of innovation or a lot more money
from the Government to do that,
and there's definitely a lot to be done, and deadlines
always move, right? But it's good to have goals.
Yeah.
There's a strong argument that to be serious about reducing our
carbon footprints, heat pumps are the answer.
But with them comes a hefty price tag, because, let's face it, £5,000
from the Government isn't enough for all the work that needs
to be done around them.
Then you've got the upheaval in your home, and if you don't mind
either of those things, then you might not get one installed
anyway because there's not enough trained workers.
JUSTIN: One of the key barriers facing heat pump installation
goes back a surprisingly long way.
This is one of the most energy-efficient houses in the UK.
These walls have got about ten centimetres of insulation in them.
The roof has five times the amount.
It's like a giant duvet over the whole house.
HE GRUNTS
So, look at this. There is a sea of insulation here.
And the problem is most British homes
just aren't as well-insulated as this place.
But it wasn't meant to be like this.
In 2006, the Government made new grants available to help insulate,
draught-proof and double-glaze less wealthy homes.
In 2012 alone, over two million homes had taken advantage of it.
Then, in 2013, David Cameron pulled the grants,
allegedly calling them "green crap".
The number of new insulation
projects collapsed
to less than 300,000 a year.
As a result, only half of UK homes have cavity or wall insulation,
and only 40% have the recommended amount of roof insulation.
It's been shown that it is possible to install heat pumps in
90% of homes, but many will need extra insulation
for better efficiency.
It's hardly surprising, then,
that heat pumps are having such a slow roll-out.
This revolution isn't happening anywhere near fast enough.
At current rates of installation,
it will take more than 400 years
before every British home
has a heat pump.
So, should the Government really be relying on new technology
which is so expensive?
Graham Stuart is a minister in the newly formed
Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Right.
You say 90% of homes are ready to take heat pumps,
but only if they invest in insulation, bigger radiators.
These are really costly. It costs, often, tens of thousands of pounds
to put a heat pump in, as opposed to a couple of thousand pounds
for a gas boiler.
It's just very, very expensive.
Well, some need no alteration at all, and some needs investment.
That's why we think that 10%, probably,
there isn't an economic route to doing it,
but work goes on all the time to get a better clarity on that.
But most homes can have heat pumps.
The price of heat pumps is coming down, the speed
of installation is increasing,
and we think that heat pumps,
with a rebalanced pricing system
across the energy sector,
will become more and more competitive, going forward,
and I've certainly been delighted with mine.
TARA: So, if heat pump take-up is proving so problematic,
perhaps we need another solution.
This is Whitby in Cheshire.
In this very unlikely prefabricated building,
they have a completely different vision for the future
of home heating.
Hi, Tara. Hey. Lovely to meet you.
Good to see you. Come on in. Thank you.
Believe it or not, this is the site of a serious net-zero experiment.
So...
..a boiler?! Yeah.
You're suitably underwhelmed. THEY LAUGH
It is a boiler, but it's burning on 100% hydrogen.
So it's heating radiators,
it's heating hot water.
How is it a net-zero solution?
When we burn it, the only product is water.
So, at its point of use, there is no carbon involved whatsoever.
So this can fit in, basically, then, where my old gas boiler is,
I don't have to go reconfiguring my kitchen. Absolutely.
It's one of the benefits.
It's just such a simple way of decarbonising the way
we heat our homes today.
Darren Elsom works for Cadent, the UK's largest
gas distribution network.
We've been investing in gas network for a good couple of decades,
replacing old iron pipes to new plastic pipes.
So the new plastic pipes are absolutely suitable for hydrogen.
Around 75% to 80% of the network is already plastic.
So we won't have to dig up the roads again?
Not promising never dig up the road!
Hydrogen gas is very different to the natural gas we're used to.
It's much lighter, and leakier,
and it's also highly explosive.
So it would need modern pipework throughout the network to be safe.
But Cadent claims that their current gas network
is almost ready to carry hydrogen.
Well, that seems sort of possible, except for one thing.
Where is the nation's hydrogen actually going to come from?
Come and see down here.
Even in the UK's most impressive hydrogen show home,
the hydrogen actually arrives in tanks.
To pipe hydrogen to millions of homes,
we would need massive quantities of it.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.
It's all around us, billions and billions of tonnes of it.
But the problem is
most of it is locked up in the water
of our oceans.
The cleanest and greenest way to produce it is to use electricity,
lots of it, through a process called electrolysis.
But most of the time it's more efficient just to use
the electricity to heat our homes with heat pumps.
So, is there a solution?
I'm on my way to meet some people who think they have the answer.
This is Stanlow Oil Refinery, just a few miles away
from the hydrogen test house.
Every year it processes nine million tonnes of crude oil,
making billions of litres of fuel for our cars.
On the face of it, not the most likely player
in the net-zero future.
It's like an enormous puzzle.
It really is.
This refinery produces about
two million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide.
Just this site? Just this site. Oh!
So this is the catalytic cracker here?
So this is the cat cracker itself.
Wow!
Very high temperatures, up to 700 degrees in there.
Those gases get emitted into the atmosphere.
It's that burning of the coat that causes those CO2 emissions.
You would have thought that in a world of renewable energy,
electric cars and heat pumps,
that this place would be consigned to history.
But the owners of Stanlow see a future in hydrogen.
They've teamed up with gas distributors Cadent and a group
of other companies to form HyNet, a Government-backed project
to produce and distribute hydrogen
in the North West of England...
..because the hydro in the hydrocarbons they produce
is actually hydrogen.
And this coalition of oil and gas companies think they can
stay in business by extracting the hydrogen
from the hydrocarbons like natural gas.
So we're just coming up now to the site of two plants
of hydrogen production.
We will be building those over the next three to four years.
Those first two plants will have a combined output of one gigawatt,
which is enough to power a large city, such as Liverpool,
just up the road.
They say the hydrogen they produce could fuel industry,
furnaces for steel, ovens for glass,
and possibly heat our homes too.
It's a wildly ambitious plan -
keep on extracting oil and gas and take out the hydrogen.
But there is a snag.
This process produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide.
To make hydrogen a low-carbon fuel,
you need to produce the hydrogen but also capture
and store the carbon.
We will capture...
..about 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
Wow.
Then they plan to pump all of that carbon dioxide under the sea,
storing it underground, they claim, forever.
We will compress CO2,
it will flow through pipework
out to sea and into depleted gas fields in Liverpool Bay.
The issue is that it's not 100% efficient, and no-one in the UK
has ever done it at scale before.
So it's all a multimillion-pound experiment.
They also say that the process will eventually be replaced
by a fully green production method that doesn't involve hydrocarbons.
And hydrogen for heating our homes is also proving to be problematic.
The Government said if they haven't got the support of the residents,
it can't happen.
So let's make sure it doesn't.
APPLAUSE
In 2021, Cadent announced that the nearby village of Whitby
would become part of a new hydrogen trial.
Residents were told their gas boilers would be replaced
with hydrogen boilers.
But many of them felt they were being forced into becoming
guinea pigs in the gas giant's experiment.
I think the feeling was quite clear for a lot of residents
that this isn't the way to go to achieve net zero,
and it's certainly not something that a majority of residents
are wanting to take part in.
Whitby resident Kate Grannell leads a protest group that want to stop
the hydrogen roll-out, as they have some serious concerns.
Hi! Hi, how are you doing? Kate? I'm all right. Yeah.
Lovely to meet you. I'm Tara. Hi. Come in.
We had no independent person to advise us.
So we've got, you know, a gas company and a gas distribution
network company that really need to sell this idea.
And what do you think about that? What's your view on it?
Yeah, so I think it will never be cost-effective or efficient.
It will always be more than your natural gas because you need
the natural gas to create hydrogen.
So, do you think it will be green hydrogen that comes
through the pipes for the project here in Whitby?
When we have challenged them and we've said, "Will it be 100% green,
"100% of the time?" they've said no.
And there's already been definitive publications out there
that has already said there will not be enough green hydrogen
to roll this out across the UK.
As a result of the protests, the Government recently indicated
it will call off the Whitby hydrogen trial.
Discussions are still ongoing over a similar trial in Redcar.
Meanwhile, a number of influential reports have cast grave doubt
about the practicality of hydrogen as a domestic fuel.
For a company locked into fossil fuels,
that's very bad news.
Is hydrogen for heating of residential homes
really going to be part of the long-term solution?
Yeah, absolutely. We need a range of solutions
if we're actually going to achieve net zero.
There is no alternative, if we want to achieve net zero by 2050.
So we need to get hydrogen moving, get it operating at scale.
But ultimately, green hydrogen is the way we need to go.
JUSTIN: Hydrogen as a heating fuel for homes.
Does it make any sense?
Because most experts seem to think it's way too expensive,
we won't have enough of it.
Why even bother with these trials, which have proved really unpopular?
When you look at the massive roll-out of renewables,
the opportunity to take the constraint payments,
when we effectively have to pay generators not to generate
at certain times, to be able to convert that into hydrogen,
so as to store that green energy,
that gives us all sorts of potential uses.
And in that context, there is a case for seeing how it may have
a part to play in the decarbonisation of heating in homes.
Whatever we decide about how we're going to heat our homes,
one thing is for certain - we are going to need a hell of a lot
more electricity, and it's all going to need to be green.
Right now, at peak times, the National Grid needs
60 gigawatts of electricity.
By 2050,
some estimates suggest
that'll need to double
to at least 120 gigawatts.
At the moment, about 40% is generated by gas.
That's going to have to be phased out.
That means, in the next 27 years,
we have to quadruple - QUADRUPLE -
the amount of green energy this country produces.
Now, in terms of national infrastructure, that is a massive,
perhaps even unprecedented challenge.
So, to meet its 2050 net-zero target,
the Government has set an objective -
decarbonise the entire electricity supply by 2035.
MICHELLE: Wind has been a great British success story.
We're global leaders.
We have two of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world.
When the weather is right, wind can generate more than
60% of our electricity,
and it's all been done in a few short years.
But building turbines out at sea is expensive.
Most experts agree that to hit net zero by 2050,
we need much cheaper wind turbines on land...
..thousands and thousands of them.
And that's where the problems start.
It's massive!
Believe it or not, this single turbine on the outskirts of Bristol
is the biggest onshore wind project in England in the last four years.
See the team up there just now, working away?
Yeah. And they'll be...
The project manager was engineer Dave Tudgey.
Hello there! Oh, excellent. Thank you. Thank you, David. See you.
Hi, Michelle. Hi, Dave. Nice to meet you. Lovely to meet you.
So, here it is in all its glory.
It's here. It's arrived, yes. Yeah.
The tallest and largest, the most powerful onshore
wind turbine in England.
Every time I look at it, I'm just blown away
by how beautiful it is.
SHE LAUGHS
In the past five years, only 20 new onshore turbines in England
have received planning permission.
And this is one.
Where are the rest of them? Well, this is the only one,
and this actually represents a quarter of all turbines
and 75% of the capacity of the energy installed
over the last four years, just one single turbine.
That is...quite something!
And even getting just one turbine built has been a planning nightmare.
A symbol of the troubles of onshore wind.
Dave doesn't work for an energy giant, either.
You know, on first glance, it does seem like an unlikely location
for the country's leading wind turbine project.
He works for a community charity.
They're one of the only groups in England to even try to put up
a wind turbine in the past eight years, let alone succeed.
Dave, hello. Hiya. Hi, I'm Michelle. Hello, Michelle. How are you?
Very well, thank you. I'm Mark. Nice to meet you, Mark.
Dave was engaged by Mark Pepper, who runs a charity
in Lawrence Weston, in Bristol.
We offer a lot of different services to residents, from debt advice
to food bank support.
We've even got a free veterinary service that runs from the building.
Lawrence Weston isn't the wealthiest part of the city,
and Mark was looking for money to deliver improvements
to the community.
He hit on the idea of building a turbine.
It was nothing to do with climate.
It was nothing to do, you know, with saving the planet.
It was just a plain case of needing
to generate some sort of income.
A 3.5 megawatt turbine like this can generate more than
£1 million worth of electricity a year at current prices.
Selling it to the grid could generate a healthy income
for the community.
There's money in this renewable energy lark if you go
about it the right way. So why can't we have, you know, a stake in that?
I just hate them. I think they just ruin the countryside.
But onshore wind farms are controversial.
They'll kill birds. They'll kill wildlife.
Opponents say they blight the landscape.
There are also concerns about the impact on wildlife
and the natural world.
Mark and Dave didn't know
that they were about to enter into planning hell.
So this is where it all happens, then, Dave? Yeah.
Their problems started with a Government statement in 2015
which meant almost any objection would block planning permission.
This is it, isn't it?
The written ministerial statement came about,
which had two conditions,
effectively put a kibosh on all new onshore wind development
across the country.
Dave's only chance was to get the whole community on board,
and meant he had to produce a detailed document.
This document here, which is goodness knows how many pages long,
is actually all the community consultation we did.
Dave then set about raising the money and finding a site.
But that's when the real red-tape nightmare began.
It was a SSSI, a site of scientific interest.
There's contaminated land,
there's archaeology, there's habitat assessments,
there's two years of bird surveys.
This is the picture of the gas assessment, identifying, with flags,
where the gas pipeline is,
and behind it is Seabank Power Station.
But after five years of work,
Dave finally managed to convene a planning meeting.
Committee. Hopefully, you have all had my written statement where I
note the high levels of citizen support for this application.
With the default across England being a firm "no"
on onshore turbines, it was an anxious time.
Seabank Power Station,
they're worried that if our turbine fell over, a blade tip might hit one
of their 24 cooling towers.
How were you feeling at this point, Dave? Did you feel like this was
going to go through? My mum got so nervous,
she ended up cutting her hedge. Did she? Yeah.
The power station, more at risk from low-flying Gloucester Old Spots
than it is from us.
And despite the long odds...
For. ..it became one of only five
new onshore wind projects granted permission in England that year.
Myself, for.
That makes it unanimous.
Happy days. Happy days.
Finally! Can start the project.
I have to say, I couldn't believe it.
It was a real, real relief and a real success,
you know, that we got there.
Of course, then you've got to build it, haven't you?
And then you've got to build it. Yeah,
It's absolutely massive! When you're looking at it being built here,
you can see the scale. I mean, those blades!
Onshore and offshore wind is, alongside solar,
the best hope of decarbonising the electricity network by 2035.
And it's cheap, too.
But there's widespread opposition,
and the planning system grinds ever so slowly.
The amount of perseverance and sheer determination it's taken from Dave
to get this wind turbine off the ground,
I mean, it just shows how difficult
it is to build onshore wind turbines
in this country.
This is a project that was backed by the community.
They were fully on board, yet it still took
seven years to complete!
JUSTIN: Let's talk a little bit about onshore wind,
because the cheapest electricity is onshore wind.
And yet, last...this year, so far,
one single wind turbine has been erected
because the planning restrictions are so tough.
Shouldn't you make it easier for people to invest
in the cheapest renewable power in the UK?
Onshore wind is amongst the cheapest and it's massively cheaper
than it was even in 2015,
and we are working hard to find a way of making sure
that we can encourage more onshore wind in a way that does so
with community support and consent.
You can't impose things on communities against their will,
but you do need to get the right balance, make sure
that we've consulted on community benefits, to make sure
that those who host onshore wind turbines can benefit from it,
and that we create the political conditions so that we can
have a renaissance in onshore wind,
which I would very, very much like.
TARA: 70 years ago, the future was nuclear.
It was exciting and new, and we were promised cheap,
perhaps free electricity forever.
But huge cost, problems with nuclear waste, and the potential
for catastrophe meant that the last nuclear power station
came online in 1995.
Now, with a net-zero future, nuclear is back.
Because when the wind doesn't blow, we're going to need something
to keep the lights on.
At the moment, that's gas.
But as we know, gas is being phased out.
Nuclear power stations produce
tonnes of toxic radioactive waste,
but they don't emit carbon dioxide.
So, in that sense, they're green.
Nuclear currently produces about five gigawatts of
electric power to the grid,
10% to 15% of the total.
The Government wants to more than double that by 2050
to meet their net-zero target.
But half of our current nuclear electricity is generated by
power stations that were built in the 1980s.
Heysham Power Station in Lancashire currently produces a quarter
of all the UK's nuclear power.
It was built almost half a century ago, and it's on its last legs.
Thank you. Welcome, Tara.
So this is the entrance to the reactor building.
Turbine hall's down that way.
Richard Bradfield is chief technical officer.
So I'm going to go and stand on top of a nuclear reactor.
OK, let's go.
Wow! It's huge!
Just stand in the middle here and you get a...
The scale of it! ..scale of what's going on.
Point me to the reactor.
Like, is that it, where...?
So, yeah, we've got two reactors in this building
and they are below us.
There's one reactor that's generating at the moment... Yeah.
..1,500 megawatts of thermal power.
Wow! OK, come on, show me more.
The ageing reactor core needs regular inspection.
To see inside, the team has to lift the uranium fuel out
using a special crane.
What is that? This is the fuelling machine.
It's a giant crane. Wow!
So, at the moment, it's just hoisted an irradiated fuel assembly
to remove from the reactor.
It's been in there about seven years.
So it's just taken... "It's just taken," listen to this!
..seven-year-old uranium, up there, right in front of us.
That's amazing! Yeah.
Then they lower a camera
down into the hot radioactive core itself.
All good. Right, then. We're going down.
Are you moving the camera now already? Yeah... Yeah.
This is it going down? What is the camera seeing?
The camera is right at the bottom of the fuel channel now.
We're going to start, we're going to tilt a mirror through 90 degrees,
so we get a complete picture of the whole of the inside,
the circumference at all heights of the graphite.
Richard uses a model of the reactor core to show me
what they're checking for.
So what we're looking at here is a small section of the core.
These are graphite bricks. OK.
Some have got holes in, and fuel sits within these channels,
some ten metres up.
It's inherently a robust design,
but there's a couple of issues with graphite.
The constant irradiation causes it to shrink,
which causes internal stresses, and ultimately,
at some point we start to see cracking occur.
So here's the picture from the inside of
one of these graphite bricks. OK.
And you're looking at three of these slices in here. Can you see?
Oh, yeah. The black line is the crack.
And it goes all the way down. All the way down.
It's terrifying to think that there are cracks in a reactor,
right next to that fuel, that nuclear fuel,
and, like, does that mean it can escape?
No, the fuel is within the centre of this graphite brick.
When we're talking about the cracks,
they're in the graphite brick itself.
But the worry is that more serious cracking in the core
might affect their ability to turn the reactor off in the event
of an unexpected emergency.
When it might become significant is in the event of
an extreme earthquake, an extreme seismic event.
We need to be confident the reactor will be in a safe state,
and subject to that possibility of a very, very significant earthquake,
it is still always safe to shut down.
This kind of monitoring has contributed to the shutting down of
two power stations already,
but Heysham is still going strong,
already ten years beyond its original lifespan.
This reactor's been extended from originally 2014,
and we've just extended it from 2024 to 2026.
Wow, so it's still producing electricity reliably and safely.
Yeah. That's amazing, you know,
that you've been able to extend its life by this careful monitoring.
But by 2028, the cracks may have become so serious
that Heysham and the other old nuclear power stations
at Hartlepool and Torness might finally have to close.
And this will nearly halve the amount of electricity
nuclear will bring to the National Grid.
Pretty alarming when the plan is to double nuclear output.
To replace this power,
Government is embarking on an ambitious and hugely expensive
series of new nuclear plants.
The first is Hinkley Point C,
on the banks of the Bristol Channel in Somerset.
It's huge -
nearly a square mile of new buildings.
It's currently the largest single building project in Europe.
And it's set to provide nearly a quarter of the Government's
nuclear targets on its own.
But the history of this project
shows just how difficult nuclear power is.
In 2007, EDF announced they would
build a new nuclear power station,
Hinkley Point C, opening by 2017.
They submitted a 55,000-page
planning application in 2011.
By 2018, construction finally began.
Then, in 2021,
opening slipped to 2025.
Currently, it's predicted
to open in 2026.
And the costs have spiralled, too.
The other new nuclear power project
will almost certainly be in Suffolk,
next to the existing Sizewell B plant.
But it's been stuck in planning for over a decade
without even a single spade being sunk.
But even if these two power stations
come online in time for net zero,
they won't be nearly enough to replace gas.
But don't worry, there's another plan.
For more than 50 years,
some of the most powerful and terrifying military hardware
in the world has been powered by nuclear reactors -
submarines and aircraft carriers that can stay at sea
for years without refuelling.
Now there is a call to use similar small modular reactors
to generate our electricity.
Kirsty Gogan is a consultant for the nuclear industry.
This example is a 20-megawatt plant, which is obviously a lot smaller
than the 3.6-gigawatt plant being built at Hinkley Point C.
The advantage is that once it's made, it can be moved by road
or by rail to its location and then installed on site.
But remember, this is technology that has never been used
in this way, so the costs are still likely to be high.
It's really expensive to build the first one. It's a huge investment.
But if you have an intentional, really focused,
programmatic approach to building
even the conventional construction projects,
you get very quickly into a drumbeat of delivery
that represents a really very good cost.
But even so, most suggest nuclear will probably be more expensive
than traditional power stations and renewables.
So, to make nuclear more attractive to investors, Government
has committed to buying every watt of electricity they will ever
produce at an agreed price.
We may be paying with higher electricity bills for decades.
So it's using public money to subsidise nuclear power.
I read somewhere that, you know, even just for Hinkley Point C,
that's, like, 19 billion is what the equivalent of that price
is over those 35 years. Yeah.
I mean, all the low-carbon energy infrastructure
that we're really trying to incentivise is currently receiving
some kind of subsidy, just like nuclear.
Without that, it's really difficult to make the investment case
because you have to spend such a lot up front.
So why do you think it is that Government and the private sector
and the investors have got behind renewables and not nuclear
up until now? It's fast to build a wind and solar project,
so if we want to get to zero across our
whole energy infrastructure,
then we need to start creating those good market conditions
for nuclear energy as well.
But it also means that Government could play a role.
The story of the UK's nuclear sector
is not one that inspires confidence.
The current fleet is old and creaky,
and the new fleet is beset by delays,
by grinding regulation and by spiralling costs.
And now Government is betting everything
on a new nuclear technology that doesn't even exist.
JUSTIN: If you want 25% of power to come from nuclear,
you need to start investing now.
And the truth is, it's going to take a long time and it is going
to be very expensive, arguably too expensive
compared to the cost of renewables.
Well, of course, what nuclear provides is a base load,
which renewables don't. And the truth is, we need everything,
and nuclear is an important part of that.
And I think international bodies have said they can't see a way
to net zero in 2050 for the world
if nuclear isn't part of that.
And we're determined to make the UK a world leader.
Now, you talk about small modular plants.
We've already discussed how long it takes, for example, to get
a new large nuclear reactor built.
15 years of planning at Sizewell C, at least. Now you're saying,
"We want to reinvent nuclear power
"and do these small-scale modular reactors,"
and yet this is a new product.
It is going to take, not just years, decades before this is ready
to roll out, is it?
You're not a very optimistic person!
One of the great benefits of SMRs is replicability.
So, just as we're...Sizewell will be a copy of Hinkley,
so that we can learn by doing and speed up production,
become more efficient, lower costs,
the same thing, in spades, applies to SMRs,
but none have been built yet.
That's the idea behind it,
but I recognise it's challenging.
We can do this,
and my message overall on net zero is, "We can do this."
You've got to believe. You can always have the doubters
and the sceptics at your heels.
We're leading, the world is following, and we can do this,
and nuclear is part of the mix.
But generating enough green electricity is not the only problem.
Even if the nuclear power stations are built on time,
even if the planning system allows for more onshore wind,
even if there's all the solar, the batteries
and the hydroelectric power that's needed,
we might not be able to get all this new electricity
on to the National Grid.
Tens of billions of pounds' worth of green energy projects
are currently on hold because of a lack of capacity
in the National Grid.
Britain's electricity network is owned and operated by a series
of private companies, and it's been reported that some
green energy projects are waiting up to 15 years to get plugged in.
MICHELLE: Connecting up all the new wind farms, solar panels,
practically doubling our electricity use, means a huge national upgrade
in the network.
I've come to London to try to understand the scale of the job
the National Grid is facing.
Well, I'm looking forward to this!
This is Sarah.
Sarah Woolham-Jaffier is in charge of one of their
biggest infrastructure projects.
Come on down. Let's do it.
They're building 20 miles of tunnels
to carry huge new electricity cables under London.
Oh, wow!
So how far down are we now, Sarah?
We're just over 30 metres deep, and we're here in Brixton,
and then this tunnel goes all the way to Wimbledon.
The new 40,000-volt cables will help to charge all those new
electric cars and power the electric pumps heating our homes.
Are you ready? Let's give it a go.
Some of the tunnels are so long, mechanics and installers need bikes
to get around.
There's a nice breeze. Yeah, it's lovely!
Even this single project will take four more years to complete,
but if the grid is to hit its targets, they need to do much more
than just this one tunnel.
Typically, National Grid would only be building one to two projects
of this scale,
and now we're talking about 17, what we call major projects
across National Grid in the UK.
The problem is a lot of the new power will come from wind farms
in Scotland and out at sea.
That electricity needs to be carried to the big cities,
and that means thousands of new high-voltage cables, pylons...
..substations, battery storage...
..and of course, that takes time.
Sarah, how long has it taken to get to this point now?
So we've been tunnelling for over two years.
This section of tunnel started in March 2020.
So it takes a long time to complete.
It takes a considerable number of years of planning.
So there's hundreds of landowners and utilities
that we need to cooperate with.
We started developing this project in 2008,
and so it can be over a decade in many cases.
The National Grid has admitted that they're struggling to meet
new demands, which they blame on excessive regulation.
They say the necessary upgrades could cost
tens of billions of pounds and suggest prices will need to rise.
JUSTIN: Emma Pinchbeck is the CEO of Energy UK...
Hey, Emma, how are you doing? I'm all right, thank you. How are you?
Good to see you. You're working late.
..the organisation that represents the power generators
and the National Grid.
The National Grid simply isn't fit for purpose, is it?
I think we should be honest about the scale
of the challenge ahead.
We've got to grow the electricity sector by
two to three times its current size over the next decade.
It's physically possible to do this, but the way we fund
grid infrastructure in the UK is highly regulated
and a lot of that regulation is not fit for purpose.
And so we need to make sure everything speeds up
so we can fund the things in the places we need.
That sounds like a very clever answer, but there isn't the capacity
for new renewable projects to plug into the grid.
There's a huge queue waiting, some of them for 15 years, Emma!
Some of the grid connections are taking far too long to come through,
and in my job, what's changed over the last five years
has been this is no longer about money.
It's about things like wires in the ground or enough people
to build the kit.
I'm worried, but it's not true to say we can't manage it.
The system operator is confident that they can absorb the amount
of renewables we're planning to put on the system over the next decade.
But you're right at the problem.
The reason I'm kicking against the question is that I am so done
with people explaining to the energy sector that we haven't thought
about the fact that wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.
We know that. That's factored in.
We still think we can do it.
This energy revolution holds out so much promise -
new technologies, new industries, new jobs.
But it is not going to be easy.
Would you want to be in charge of getting planning permission
for all those new wind turbines and solar farms?
And what about getting the go-ahead for a new nuclear plant?
What makes it all the more difficult is it's all got to be done by 2050,
which is why it is no exaggeration to say
this is one of the greatest challenges
our country has ever faced.
To find out more about the challenges of our journey
to net zero, and what you can do to make more of an impact,
go to...
..and follow the link to the Open University.