The future of electric cars arrived this week in China. The world’s biggest car seller, BYD, unveiled a new battery giving its latest electric models more than 600 miles of range. Remarkably, the Chinese motor-maker said 250 miles of range could be injected into its new batteries in just five minutes. If true, the last remaining advantages of petrol cars – long range and quick refuelling – are beginning to disappear.
But such technology requires megawatt charging points. A single charger can draw as much power as a small town in Britain. BYD’s system relies on chargers delivering around 1.5 megawatts of electricity – more than four times the fastest chargers in the UK. China is moving fast, planning thousands of megawatt charging stations within two years.
Britain, by contrast, would struggle to support such a network today. Without upgrades to substations and local networks, the system could not handle the power spikes created by ultra-fast EV charging. This country’s electricity responsibilities are split across many bodies and firms. Improvements are slow and difficult, especially compared with China’s state-directed grid investment. The Chinese model resembles in some ways Britain’s postwar electricity system.
Under the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), as the economic historian Arthur Downing points out, generation, transmission and system operation were integrated within a single organisation that planned the network. Large power stations were linked by a national grid and run as one system, delivering decades of efficiency gains and falling electricity prices.
Electricity abundance in Britain did not emerge because the state withdrew. It emerged because the state created institutions capable of coordinating a complex industry. Britain built its first national electricity grid in seven years. Today some transmission projects take double that just to get planning approval and grid connection. Building the infrastructure for the low-carbon transition requires institutional capacity – not simply deregulation.
Seen by Margaret Thatcher as a relic, the CEGB was broken up and privatised in 1989. Labour warned that prices would rise. They did. The “privatisation premium”, according to an analysis by the Common Wealth thinktank, sees almost a quarter of the average household energy bill – roughly £450 – flow today into corporate profits. Other essential services are similarly hit. Nearly 30% of a water bill in the English privatised system goes to shareholder returns and paying debt. By contrast, publicly owned Scottish Water spends 10% of revenue on borrowing costs.
These costs are not primarily the price of pipes, power stations or grids. They reflect financing and ownership. Public utilities borrowed close to the government rate. Private firms must also reward shareholders – raising the cost of capital that lands up in household bills. Over 30 to 40 years, the cost difference adds up to billions.
Privatisation fragmented Britain’s electricity system, replacing integrated planning with firms, regulators and markets. Yet infrastructure networks depend on knowledge built over decades by engineers in laboratories and operators. When those institutions disappear, much of that capability disappears with them. Britain now faces a choice: rebuild the capacity to coordinate the grid – or watch technologies like BYD’s arrive elsewhere.
