Imagine popping down to the supermarket and having your electric car charge up while you're inside shopping, or parking in a busy street and plugging into a handy point that will keep your green and non-polluting vehicle going for another few hours.

It might sound futuristic, but the great British recharge is happening for green motorists in supermarket car parks and streets across London and the North East right now.

Alas, it is not happening in Cornwall – yet, at any rate. The county had hoped to become one of the first places in the UK to have publicly available vehicular recharge points, but was pipped to the post by the two areas mentioned and Milton Keynes.

There is good news and bad when it comes to Cornwall's future plans for eco-friendly motoring.

The second round of the Government's much-vaunted Plugged-In-Places scheme, which oversees the placing of the public plug-in points at locations easily accessible to motorists, is now subject to the widespread public spending cuts that will be announced in October.

In other words the scheme has a large question mark hanging over it, although the WMN has been told by Cornwall Council's cabinet member for the environment, Julian German, that his team is still confident the government will go ahead.

At the same time it has just been announced that some parts of the Electric Vehicle Consumer Initiative will survive. This programme offers a financial incentive to car owners wanting to swap conventional petrol or diesel models for an electric, plug-in or hydrogen fuel vehicle.

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond last week told the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders that the Plug-In Car Grant, designed to stimulate demand for low-carbon vehicles, will go ahead from January 2011.

But he said there will now only be a pot of just £43m for the scheme, rather than the £230m quoted by Labour when the government first broached the scheme.

Mr Hammond confirmed that motorists will receive a grant of up to 25 per cent of the up-front value of the vehicle, capped at £5,000, when buying an electric, plug-in or hydrogen fuel car. But when the pot runs dry, that will be that.

However, the Government has encouraged Cornwall Council to resubmit its funding bid later this year, which gives Mr German some optimism. "We now have a very clear idea of just what we need to do to further develop our bid and work has already started on ensuring that we meet the criteria and are successful in the next round of funding," he told the WMN.

"We are still positive that the Plugged in Places scheme is still going on – at least, we are as certain as we can be in these times – and we are working with a number of partners, like the NHS, to get a good bid in.

"We understand there's probably going to be competition from a couple of other rural areas, but we have had reasonable amount of time to work on this now. The council has put money into the bid through the Green Cornwall programme and we are hopping that some others will put in some as well."

So what will a green-transport Cornwall look like in the short-term future if Mr German has his way? – rural areas offer different challenges to the more intensive road networks of cities and conurbations now being served by the Plug-In-Places scheme.

For a start, Cornwall Council has already made plans to convert its own staff and member transport to electric if the bid is successful, saving hundreds of thousands of miles per year. Add to that other big organisations like the NHS, and you almost instantly have large savings when it comes to the county's carbon footprint. But will Cornwall's private motorists benefit as well?

"In some places the Plugged-In-Scheme would be applied to a council or hospital site," Mr German answered. "But of course many of those will also have public access. For other sites you could be looking along the spine of Cornwall – along the A30 there are garages, drive-thru pasty shops, places like that, where it would be perfectly sensible to have access for both public service vehicles and for the general public.

"We have to make sure we have that reach across Cornwall. But there are different capacities for the sockets," he added. "So in some areas you might want a lower capacity where you leave a vehicle on charge overnight – in other places you might want to get that quick charge in 20 minutes."

In a way the future of Cornish motoring can be represented by the age-old "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" question.

"We need to get charging points in to encourage people to use electric cars," said Mr German. "But currently the cars are expensive – so in a low-wage area like Cornwall that sets its own challenges."

And as the councillor points out, electric cars and plug-in points are only a small part of a very large whole when it comes to green transport.

"Our local transport plan has just come out and that's about making the public transport system as good as it can be," says Mr German. "Let's take congestion as an example: replacing lots of petrol cars with electric ones isn't going to help congestion in Cornwall – we have to think of other things, like how we can enable people to work from home, or travel to work in a different way."

So will we be experiencing a quieter, less busy, Cornish road system in, say, five years time?

"In five years? Yes, is the short answer," said a confident Mr German. "Whether we get the funding on this scheme or not, I am sure the public sector will start to move toward putting in an infrastructure and purchasing or leasing some electric cars. It's really down to how quickly we can go ahead – this funding will speed things up.

"In terms of council tax, electric cars are much cheaper to run – if it's about the financial side, an electric fleet would reduce costs," he concluded. "The good news is that we are starting to see prices of these vehicles come down."

You could argue that the greening of rural transport in places like Cornwall and the wider Westcountry is vital if we are to make inroads on the nation's carbon footprint. Official figures show that on an individual basis people living in the countryside travel more than eight times further than their big city neighbours.

That's a lot of miles and pollution. Perhaps the Government should have placed Cornwall's bid to plug-in above that of London, the North East and Milton Keynes. But the big question for drivers down here where car average mileages tend to be higher is how to keep on the move between charges.