Tortally agree. I was not advocating wind power for the UK but advocating electric traction powered by an efficient power source. Dare I say nuclear in a UK context for example?
Efficient? Well wind power has an input cost of zero, so efficiency doesn't actually matter, because the fuel is free. People often (mistakenly) compare efficiency and load factor (which for offshore wind is pushing 50% now). Wind & solar power spank nuclear on cost and investibility too...
Back on topic:
Is there anything other than the 195s that would have their life/valuation seriously affected by Johnson Jr's pronouncements?
Even then, you can qualify with the spirit of this by repowering. The "mild hybrid" approach that is coming into automotive now, using a small electric motor / integrated starter-generator to assist the diesel engine would surely make it conform to the letter of what has been asked for, rather than the vaulting ambition they want to us to think they have.
Personally, I think the industry will come back with discontinuous but high power electrification, with pantographs going up and down like a fiddler's elbow across the network. If you can reduce the range requirement to <50 miles, then you can probably do that with no weight penalty over a DMU (e.g. the QSK19 in a 22x is 2t, and a full tank of diesel adds another 1t, 3t of batteries is quite a lot). It's easy to call this an overweight EMU, but taking that line misses the point that infrastructure and trains are an integrated system, and that you'll save £Billions by not having to wire every nook and cranny of the network.
Should the gaps be 500 meters or 50 miles? I expect that depends on quite a lot of factors, both technical and commercial