The CEO of GRIDSERVE discusses why we must act now to combat climate change and adopt electric vehicles.
The idea of “maybe someday” when it comes to switching to an electric car is no longer an option we can afford. It’s easy to think of electric vehicles (EVs) as something for the future, perhaps as the technology improves or when hydrogen vehicles become a viable alternative. But the truth is, delaying the transition is a fatal mistake.
In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made it clear: we have less than 1,000 days to reach peak carbon emissions and start cutting them down if we are to keep global warming within 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels. Why does this matter so much? At 2°C of warming, the world’s coral reefs will almost certainly perish, and we’re heading towards that reality if we don’t peak emissions before 2025—less than three years from now.
Many ask if we’ll be ready for the 2030 deadline when the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles will be banned. The truth is, we will be ready, but if we wait until 2030, it will be far too late. We are talking about just 2,700 days from now, and if we take that long to make the switch, we will have already overshot critical thresholds.
This is our moment. The narrow window of opportunity to tackle climate change is uniquely ours, and it’s a responsibility we can’t afford to ignore. Yet, despite the urgency, it feels like we’re sleepwalking into disaster, failing to grasp this moment with the necessary resolve.
The good news is, making the switch to electric cars is no longer a sacrifice. EVs are fantastic today—they’re cheaper to run than petrol cars over their lifetime, they’re more enjoyable to drive, and they retain their value much better than their fossil-fuel counterparts. As someone who has driven electric cars since 2014, I can tell you there’s no longer any need for “range anxiety.” The charging infrastructure has expanded significantly, and I’m never far from a charger. Now, our industry is tackling “charger anxiety,” ensuring we have the right number of fast chargers at the right locations.
In the past 10 months, GRIDSERVE has upgraded over 160 charging locations, expanded to cover 85% of the motorway network, and built seven new high-power Electric Super Hubs at motorway service stations, plus a brand-new Electric Forecourt in Norwich. The biggest challenge now is the bottleneck in new connections to the national grid that fast chargers require, but we’re overcoming that barrier and progress is accelerating.
I’m convinced the shift to electric vehicles will follow the same trajectory as mobile phones. Before the iPhone, most of us were focused on the next Nokia model. A few years later, smartphones took over, and Nokia became a thing of the past. The same is happening with EVs. We’re on track to make the electric driving experience so superior to petrol or diesel refuelling that people will wonder why they didn’t make the switch sooner.
At electric forecourts, refuelling your car is a breeze—you simply use your mobile phone, you don’t have to handle a fuel nozzle, and you can take a break while your car charges. And you certainly won’t miss the smell and mess of a petrol station.
The future will judge us on how we responded to this unique challenge. Our grandchildren will not forgive us if we say, “I meant to switch to electric, but I was waiting.” The time to act is now.
