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From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.<\/p>\n
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.<\/p>\n
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.<\/p>\n
Your support makes all the difference.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nRead more<\/span><\/svg><\/span><\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nEuropean car giants risk becoming obsolete like Blockbuster unless they fully embrace battery electric vehicles (EVs), the boss of green energy firm Octopus has warned. <\/p>\n
This caution comes as lobbying by carmakers in Europe has led to Brussels watering down plans for the transition to electric vehicles.<\/p>\n
Octopus boss Greg Jackson said European manufacturers should be prepared to compete with EVs from China. <\/p>\n
He added that wider EV adoption would help address storing renewable energy from intermittent sources like wind, as “power could be drawn from electric car batteries when they are not in use\u201d.<\/p>\n
The UK government has pledged to outlaw sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, with only zero-emission models permitted from 2035. <\/p>\n
In December, the European Commission watered down its total ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035, with the UK government under pressure from critics to follow suit. <\/p>\n
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open image in gallery<\/span><\/button><\/p>\n<\/div>Octopus CEO Greg Jackson (The Independent)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe new plan for the EU is for 90 per cent of new cars sold from 2035 to be zero-emission.<\/p>\n
Mr Jackson told the Press Association: \u201cWhat\u2019s happening in Europe is you\u2019ve got a small number of very powerful companies that are not very good at making EVs.\u201d<\/p>\n
He warned: \u201cUnless Europe gets with the plot and really accelerates its capabilities on battery electric vehicles, we won\u2019t have a car industry, because the reality is the Chinese cars are not cheap because of subsidies or because of cheap labour, they\u2019re cheap because they\u2019ve invested in the research and development and the modern manufacturing.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we saw what happened to Blockbuster, to Borders books, to Kodak. We don\u2019t want that to happen to the car companies, but they have to save themselves. Nokia \u2013 I remember when Nokia saw the iPhone, instead of working out how do they build an equivalent, they kept trying to tell us that buttons were more important.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reality is, these technologies are out there. The genie is out of the bottle for these technologies and Europe has to get to grips with it, because they can\u2019t stop it. They will do a lot better by trying to compete than trying to deny.\u201d<\/p>\n
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open image in gallery<\/span><\/button><\/p>\n<\/div>The UK government has pledged to outlaw sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, with only zero-emission models permitted from 2035 (Alamy\/PA)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nMr Jackson said plans for the UK energy grid did not take account of the falling cost of batteries to store power generated by renewable technologies such as wind and solar farms.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cost of grid-scale batteries is plummeting,\u201d he said. \u201cOur UK grid plans don\u2019t take account of that, which is why we could replace an awful lot of the planned new infrastructure with cheap batteries.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven better than that, electric vehicles contain a battery that\u2019s big enough to power a house for the best part of a week. The more electric cars we get, the more we can soak up that generation when it\u2019s cheap.<\/p>\n
\u201cOctopus alone has about two-and-a-half gigawatts of storage in electric cars that we can shift to grab that cheap power. The UK is a 50 gigawatt system, so you\u2019re already at the point where a significant proportion of our existing system can do this, and electric cars are only 5 per cent of cars.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they get to 100 per cent you\u2019ve literally got an entire system\u2019s worth of storage for free.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem is too many of our grid plans spend money because they\u2019re not taking account of that, and the job now is to urgently reassess all of those plans and stop spending money, except where we really, really need to.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the UK, registrations of pure battery EVs were up 23.9 per cent year-on-year to 473,348 in 2025, a market share of 23.4 per cent of new cars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it. Your support makes all the difference. Read more European car giants risk becoming obsolete like Blockbuster unless they fully embrace battery electric vehicles (EVs), the boss of green energy firm Octopus has warned. This caution comes as lobbying by carmakers in Europe has led to Brussels watering down plans for the transition to electric vehicles. Octopus boss Greg Jackson said European manufacturers should be prepared to compete with EVs from China. He added that wider EV adoption would help address storing renewable energy from intermittent sources like wind, as “power could be drawn from electric car batteries when they are not in use\u201d. The UK government has pledged to outlaw sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, with only zero-emission models permitted from 2035. In December, the European Commission watered down its total ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035, with the UK government under pressure from critics to follow suit. open image in gallery Octopus CEO Greg Jackson (The Independent) The new plan for the EU is for 90 pe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10917,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seekyourlove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}