Which is, of course, yay! But - there's always a but, isn't there? - he's only supplying a third of the £60m needed to get this electric revolution started. There is a £250m government fund available to incentivise us to buy low carbon vehicles and the Mayor wants to get a big bite of this, but it's not guaranteed (and if the Labour vs Boris spat continues, who knows if he'll get his cash, especially since the government want to spend some of it on giving people £2k subsidies to buy electric cars). The rest is expected to come from the private sector - but with the economy the way it is, can we really see developers splashing out on charging points when they can barely fund the actual construction costs?
The second but - we're butting up against buts today - are the green claims themselves. Electric cars aren't the big air polluters that fossil fuelled cars are but they're still only as green as the electricity going into them. As the London Array looks for a bailout, BP Solar slashes jobs (yet promises to somehow increase capacity) and the G20 summit barely giving low carbon and renewable energy a mention, this has the potential to be so much greenwash.
