Many of us will be familiar with this argument; Simon Thomas also tells us about his pain that he can’t use an electric car to get from Aberystwyth to get round his region of Mid and West Wales. So, I was delighted to hear that there is a proposal in the budget for this year to invest £2 million in developing more electric charging points so that we aren’t just making them available on the M4 and the eastern parts of the A55. I’ve no doubt that Simon Thomas had something to do with this, but I think that this commitment by the Welsh Labour Government is just the beginning of how we see this transformation through, because we cannot see this as a challenge to build yet another power station the size of Hinkley Point, as suggested by the National Grid, who said that that was sufficient to satisfy peak demand in the evenings if electric vehicles take off and become the norm. We have to see this as an opportunity to disperse our electricity generation and supply, and electric charging points are an ideal way of kick-starting that process.

So, how are we going to do this? The renewable that we have in abundance is wind; we are the windiest country in Europe. So, instead of getting the Brigands Inn on the A470 to install an electric charging point hooked up to the grid, they could be generating their own wind and solar energy, just like Chris Blake is already doing. Indeed, if they do install an electric charging point using conventional energy from the grid, I submit that they will quickly lose their market advantage before too long, as cheaper electric charging points fuelled by renewables come along. This could provide a major boost for community energy schemes who no longer have to run the gauntlet of expensive connection costs to the grid if they have a steady income from electric vehicles needing to charge up both for local transport and for long-distance journeys. This will also then generate an additional opportunity for people to be able to generate their own energy for warming their homes.

But electric vehicle charging points are but one cog in the revolution required to deliver our more sustainable future. Last week, the World Solar Challenge, which took place in Australia, was won by a Dutch car solely powered by the sun. Even though we have less sun than in Australia, vehicles that are at least partly solar-powered are something we will need to consider too. Electric vehicles are not new to Wales. The milk float was produced in Merthyr from the 1930s up until the 1980s, and the Eco Travel Network already operates across the Brecon Beacons National Park, offering electric vehicle hire of their fleet of Renault Twizys. They’ve developed an informal 13 amp charging network with tourist businesses so visitors get an interesting choice of attractions to visit, activities to try, and places to eat and drink.

But electric vehicles are not just for individual or leisure use. They are one of the key ways we can clean up our public transport system, and this we must do because of our climate change obligations. The debate is not whether or how we will switch away from dirty diesel to clean public—it’s not whether we, but how we’re going to do this in our switch away from dirty diesel to clean public transport systems. We’ve already seen that London, Milton Keynes and Nottingham have all commissioned electric vehicles, and many of them are already in operation. Other cities will have to follow. So, the question is: can Wales build the vehicles of the future that are going to be needed, particularly for mass public transport, not least, I have to say, to capture the expertise we already have centred around the Ford engine plant in Bridgend and the Toyota hybrid engine plant on Deeside, whose current activities will cease as a result of the UK Government decision to phase out petrol and diesel combustion engines by 2040, and probably a lot earlier as a result of that? Can we build an alternative vehicle industry focused on zero-carbon ambitions to make sure we don’t lose the expertise we currently have in Bridgend and in Deeside? How can we, for example, take advantage of the production of lightweight electric London taxis, which is now happening in Caerphilly, to, for example, green our own taxi fleet?

Now, the alternative to electric vehicles is hydrogen. The hydrogen fuel cell was invented by William Grove from Swansea in the 1840s. Twelve years ago—. But we haven’t developed it, to date, properly. Twelve years ago, WalesOnline ran a story headlined ‘Hydrogen Valley to put Wales on Green Map’. The Welsh Development Agency, at that point, was setting out to develop a micro-economy in south Wales based around hydro technology. The then Minister for Economic Development and Transport, Andrew Davies, described hydrogen valley as a unique opportunity to use existing hydrogen infrastructure to harness the expertise in the private and the public sector. Within 10 years, he envisaged there would be hydrogen fuelling stations, zero-emission integrated transport networks, hydrogen-powered water taxis and hubs where HGVs can transfer goods onto electric vehicles for delivery.

The results so far are modest. The University of South Wales hydrogen centre in Baglan has developed Wales’s first hydrogen fuelling station using renewably produced hydrogen, but hydrogen refuelling stations are limited to two University of South Wales sites, in Baglan and at Pontypridd. They are working with a small company in Llandudno who plan to build hydrogen cars for leasing starting next year. But this is obviously not on the grand scale that we will need to do in the future.

My final point that we need to think about is the systems that are already in place for wireless communications between vehicles and the congestion systems that we need to manage. That is, they are already in place; we already can see them in operation when we look up how we’re going to get from A to B on Google. But, in the future, they will be used as a vehicle for managing driverless cars, and it seems to me absolutely vital that we fight to resist the privatisation of the 5G network, which will be the platform from which this can happen. This needs to be a public service, not a privatised service for profit that only those with the money can operate. So, that is a major thought I leave you with for now.