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The current Coronavirus situation has got me thinking again about the way supply chains and infrastructures are very brittle and easily disrupted, (and that this is not well understood by the public or governing bodies) and whether being able to drive a BEV or ICE vehicle is more at risk in exceptional circumstances like we have now or will soon have if things really lock down.
I have both a BEV and petrol ICE (which with rather amusing timing is sitting at a garage waiting for a new air conditioning compressor from Germany - we'll see how that goes...
) and my initial gut feeling is that if you have a BEV with home charging which has adequate range for your daily needs (and certainly for emergency trips for supplies if you're off work) that this is a significant advantage over relying on an ICE vehicle in these exceptional circumstances.
Provided that your house doesn't lose power (which seems unlikely even in a severe lockdown - or is it ?) then you can always fuel your car up at home and have a full charge for the day. No need to go to a service station and come into unnecessary contact with other people including the cashier, (as many stations still don't have pay at the pump) no need to contend with any panic buying of petrol/diesel which might result in long queues or service stations running out of fuel etc...(look at the panic buying of fuel in the US a couple of years ago during a natural disaster)
Petrol and Diesel are physical goods which don't arrive at forecourts by magic, there is a long supply chain to deliver them, and that includes having to have a cashier to keep the shop open and take payments, lorry drivers who drive the tankers to deliver the fuel to the service stations and so on, all the way back through the supply chain to the refinery and beyond. How many lorry drivers are required in the UK to keep local fuel supplies up ? What happens if one member in each of their families is infected and thus their entire family is quarantined and they can't drive their lorries ? What if there is nobody to man the service station ? etc.
On first glance it seems that the electricity infrastructure is likely to be more robust against these kind of virus epidemics than the fuel infrastructure, for two main reasons:
1) Electricity is not a physical good that has to be delivered by people on trucks or tankers over the last (hundred) miles. As long as the transmission lines stay up and the power stations stay functioning you will get electricity to your house.
2) Electricity is such an essential service that is required to keep things like hospitals running, internet connectivity and communication/phones etc running, I suspect it has a very high priority in these emergency situations. The national grid going down would be a complete disaster outside of not being able to charge EV's, so can't be allowed to happen.
Of course people are required to man gas/coal/nuclear power stations to keep them operating, but I wonder whether many of them can be reduced to an extremely low skeleton staff in an emergency, and largely remotely managed, as a control room of people sitting in front of screens could theoretically largely work from home with few boots on ground if elective maintenance works are also temporarily suspended. And wind and solar generation could theoretically continue to operate without physical manning, as long as someone is watching and managing their output on a computer screen somewhere...
On the other hand processing and delivering fuel is very much a boots on the ground physical job that needs people to do which can't be "done from home".
What do others think about the vulnerabilities of the petrol/diesel supply chain vs the potential vulnerabilities of the electricity supply chain, and are you glad to be driving a BEV in a situation where we could foreseeably see shortages of fuel supply in the coming weeks or months ? Have I missed anything in my analysis ?
I have both a BEV and petrol ICE (which with rather amusing timing is sitting at a garage waiting for a new air conditioning compressor from Germany - we'll see how that goes...
Provided that your house doesn't lose power (which seems unlikely even in a severe lockdown - or is it ?) then you can always fuel your car up at home and have a full charge for the day. No need to go to a service station and come into unnecessary contact with other people including the cashier, (as many stations still don't have pay at the pump) no need to contend with any panic buying of petrol/diesel which might result in long queues or service stations running out of fuel etc...(look at the panic buying of fuel in the US a couple of years ago during a natural disaster)
Petrol and Diesel are physical goods which don't arrive at forecourts by magic, there is a long supply chain to deliver them, and that includes having to have a cashier to keep the shop open and take payments, lorry drivers who drive the tankers to deliver the fuel to the service stations and so on, all the way back through the supply chain to the refinery and beyond. How many lorry drivers are required in the UK to keep local fuel supplies up ? What happens if one member in each of their families is infected and thus their entire family is quarantined and they can't drive their lorries ? What if there is nobody to man the service station ? etc.
On first glance it seems that the electricity infrastructure is likely to be more robust against these kind of virus epidemics than the fuel infrastructure, for two main reasons:
1) Electricity is not a physical good that has to be delivered by people on trucks or tankers over the last (hundred) miles. As long as the transmission lines stay up and the power stations stay functioning you will get electricity to your house.
2) Electricity is such an essential service that is required to keep things like hospitals running, internet connectivity and communication/phones etc running, I suspect it has a very high priority in these emergency situations. The national grid going down would be a complete disaster outside of not being able to charge EV's, so can't be allowed to happen.
Of course people are required to man gas/coal/nuclear power stations to keep them operating, but I wonder whether many of them can be reduced to an extremely low skeleton staff in an emergency, and largely remotely managed, as a control room of people sitting in front of screens could theoretically largely work from home with few boots on ground if elective maintenance works are also temporarily suspended. And wind and solar generation could theoretically continue to operate without physical manning, as long as someone is watching and managing their output on a computer screen somewhere...
On the other hand processing and delivering fuel is very much a boots on the ground physical job that needs people to do which can't be "done from home".
What do others think about the vulnerabilities of the petrol/diesel supply chain vs the potential vulnerabilities of the electricity supply chain, and are you glad to be driving a BEV in a situation where we could foreseeably see shortages of fuel supply in the coming weeks or months ? Have I missed anything in my analysis ?