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It was good to see two positive moves towards securing Britain's future power supplies, last week.
The Thames Array offshore wind farm - which could become the largest of its kind in the world - finally got the green light. And National Grid announced on Friday that it plans to greatly speed up the modernisation of the country's antiquated power grid.
Developments like these might not seem immediately relevant to fleets. After all, it could be 10 years before electric cars that are truly fit for fleet purposes go into mass production.
Nevertheless, low-cost and reliable energy supplies are vital to the success of every organisation that runs a fleet. We'd all like to be still in business when the day of the virtually zero carbon fleet actually dawns. So, given the long lead times for energy projects, the sooner they get to work on them the better.
This is particularly important for Britain. For a long time the Government has talked one game on curbing CO2 emissions - especially when it is hitting fleets with carbon taxes - but played another.
Britain now lags other major European countries when it comes to renewable energy. Schemes like the Thames Array were held up for years by the Government's refusal to provide the incentives that such projects need in order to compete with the lower capital costs of nuclear or gas plants.
Meanwhile, Britain's 1950s and '60s-vintage electricity grid is struggling to match the ever-rising demands placed on it. Surprisingly, today's 'information economy' is even more power hungry than yesterday's manufacturing economy. In the US, Yahoo.com's two server farms alone draw more electricity than every television set on the planet. And there are dozens of such installations in the UK.
Moreover, the grid simply can't cope with power inputs from wind farms and the like. That obviously needs to change soon. Yet the law prevents National Grid from increasing its investment in maintenance or new kit. A Government pledge to lift the restriction will allow an increase in spending of £2bn a year from 2012.
In the end, of course, the cost of this support and investment will be borne by taxpayers and energy consumers. Still, that might be preferable to finding, one day in 2025, that you can't get any juice for your all-electric fleet because the Internet is already drawing every Watt the country can generate!
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