Here in Brentwood we have a very longstanding association with the car industry through our relationship with Ford of Britain. I’ve written in recent months about my excitement about the coming age of driverless cars which stand to change the way we work and play. While research goes on to bring automation to our vehicles – we have a bill going through Parliament at the moment that will help solve the problem of insuring driverless cars – the Government is also helping to stoke a different revolution.
Given the problems of air pollution and global warming, the future of motoring must surely be electric. Here in Essex motorists are all too aware of London’s Low Emission Zones which have been brought in to try to tackle poor air quality from old diesel vehicles driving through the capital. As the older diesel and petrol engines become more and more environmentally unacceptable, electric vehicles will be the way forward.
The trouble is that electric vehicles need to be charged and currently their batteries tend to run down quickly. This has prompted Business Minister, Richard Harrington MP, to put £42 million of government funding into a number of energy storage research projects run by the Faraday Institution - the UK’s independent national battery research institute.
These projects will cover extending battery life, modelling new battery systems, recycling and reuse, and the next generation of solid state batteries.
Bright sparks from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham and Imperial College, London, will lead the research which stands to put the UK on the map as being at the forefront of battery technology worldwide. It will also speed up both the shift to electric vehicles and, crucially, the decarbonization of our energy supply.
We have to do something about improving air quality and vehicle emissions in this busy and congested part of the country – it’s great to see the future being incubated. www.alexburghart.org.uk