The Electricity Vehicle Policy launched by Science and Technology Minister Rna Tanveer Hussain with such fanfare in Islamabad tries to ignore the elephant in the room:where are electric vehicle owners supposed to get the electricity to charge their vehicles? The policy does call for 3000 charging stations to be set up, but slurs over who exactly is supposed to set them up. Another problem that will be faced is the viability of the national grid when this charging is taking place. The policy is quite ambitious, and rightly so, for it has provided for trucks and other heavy vehicles. The policy looks to 2060, when all vehicles on the roads will be electric. The payment of capacity charges is to be made possible by charging EV owners, but this raises the question of how would the burden of transmitting and distributing this electricity be managed.
Perhaps in the same way that the government missed the point of solarization, it may be missing the point of electric vehicles. The government thought of solarization as consisting of huge solar parks, covered with solar panels as far as the eye could see, and generating power by the gigawatt for the national grid. It did not foresee the miniaturization of generation into small units, which the consumer can afford to make the capital investment. Similarly, the government assumes that the consumer will still get automotive power from filling stations, and therefore is giving targets for the number of charging points that must be set up. However, the whole point of electric vehicles is that they can be charged from a power point that does not have to be located above an underground reservoir, like a petrol pump. The price of fuel is already so high that a vehicle that can run even on grid-supplied electricity is going to be cheaper to run than one using conventional fuel. However, what happens to the filling stations, indeed the whole distribution system, when EVs start charging at home? Make the nightmare for the oil companies worse: what happens when charging is done by solar power?
This does not include the next step, where car batteries are charged directly from solar power. The government must keep in mind that it is not dealing with a developed technology being applied or transferred to Pakistan, as was the case with vehicle manufacturer, but a technological revolution in which everything is fluid and developing.
