Betting on a green future with electric vehicles is risky business - Aleksandra Binkowska

Anyone who recalls tapping away on a BlackBerry, shelling out for a Betamax video recorder or their child begging for an iPod for Christmas will understand the risks of betting on what’s to come. But is it possible we’re going down the wrong road when it comes to the future of motor vehicles?

You wouldn’t guess to look at our scrambling policymakers, or the firms gearing up to mine rainforests and ice sheets for the metals used in batteries but, in my view, electric cars (EVs) are destined to go the way of the dodo, MySpace and the floppy disk. And it might happen sooner than you think.

Everyone sensible knows we need to move away from fossil fuels – but when it comes to motoring, we are in danger of putting all our eggs into the wrong basket.

I’m more passionate about it than most – I started a company to develop tech that turns non-recyclable plastics into hydrogen – but the Government is clearly counting solely on electric vehicles, and it could cost taxpayers dearly. By tearing up our streets and emptying the public purse to install charging points and subsidise new electric cars, politicians have gambled that EVs are here to stay.

In a strategy published last year, the Government said it wanted 300,000 charging stations on our roads by 2030. This is impossibly expensive, with a £950million “rapid-charging fund” expected to create only 6,000 of these charging points.

That’s to say nothing of £500million being rained on local councils to get them onside. If all that cash was going to buy us a carbon-free future, it could be a good investment. But EVs have all the hallmarks of soon-to-be obsolete technology, and could make the Government’s strategy a costly flop. Electric cars are so much heavier than their counterparts that they eat through tyres and damage roads at an alarming rate.

In Germany, Stuttgart has quietly banned them from entering the city at certain times of the day. EVs also deteriorate faster than traditional vehicles. That might suit the balance sheets of manufacturers, but it drives up their environmental cost and leaves potential buyers without an affordable second-hand market.

Combined with the whopping 20 percent VAT on electricity from charging stations, EVs cost a bomb. It’s no wonder there’s been a 65 percent decrease in demand for electric cars in the past year, according to Auto Trader. Hydrogen vehicles come with none of these issues. They’re lighter, cheaper, refuel in a fraction of the time and come with zero emissions.

Hydrogen is partly emerging as the fuel of the future because it’s in rich supply. It can be generated by splitting H2O (water) into hydrogen and oxygen. My company extracts it by the gasification - or pyrolysis - of plastics that would otherwise end up in our seas and landfills.

Hydrogen vehicle batteries turn that gas into fuel by combining it with oxygen – sparking a reaction that emits energy, water and a little heat. It’s about as clean as clean energy gets.

We’ve known how to extract hydrogen since the 1800s, but hydrogen fuel cells went from technology used to power rockets to a viable replacement for the engines of commercial vehicles in the early 2000s.

Since that time, investment and demand for hydrogen vehicles has varied. In the UK, there are only around 300 hydrogen-powered vehicles. But in China there are a million, including 800 buses that showcased the potential of hydrogen for public transport to an international audience at the Winter Olympics.

The Chinese government is pouring money into the industry, and manufacturers who have bet on hydrogen – Toyota and Hyundai – are reaping the benefits. Toyota is even developing the means to use hydrogen as fuel in an internal combustion engine, removing the need to develop new vehicles.

If this proves viable, this would completely transform the future of our roads – as long as we have the right infrastructure in place. Our strategy is barely out of the teething stage. When it comes to vehicles, we have none of the infrastructure needed to roll out hydrogen on a large scale. Remarkably, there are still just 16 refuelling stations across the entire UK.

We all know that going green comes at a cost, but that’s all the more reason that every pound we spend should be informed by understanding the future of energy. The alternative risks sucking up infrastructure spending and sets us back decades.

It could be the new HS2 – another project Britain doesn’t want and can’t afford.

Aleksandra Binkowska is the Founder, Hydrogen Utopia International