Australian Electricity Statistics:
According to the latest figures from the Shitsvillian Department of the Environment and Energy, we generated about 260,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2017.
And we’d need another 30,000 of them - that’s about 12 per cent more total electricity to run our new miraculous fleet of Ioniqs for all. There’s (essentially) no ‘spare’ electricity - so we’d need to generate more power.
And there’s no guarantee we’d be charging up overnight at home, using off-peak. You’d plug in at work, wouldn’t you? Suck on the boss’s teat if at all possible.
At the moment, our electricity grid is about 15 per cent renewable, and 85 per cent filthy. Obviously, to stick with that mix would be absurd - because you’d want it all to be renewable.
So basically we’d need 75 per cent more renewable electricity.
Some people say there’s been exponential growth in renewables recently. But that is emphatic, agenda-serving misrepresentation. In fact, it’s taken about 12 years to double the renewable component of the grid.
We hit 20,000 gigawatt-hours of renewable electricity for the first time in 2004-05, and 40,000 in 2016-17.
There’s been rapid growth in wind and solar - but it’s off a very low base. It’s not the same thing as ‘exponential growth of renewables’. That’s indefensible.
It’s an average compound growth rate of 5.9 per cent in renewables in 12 years.
Since 2010 the renewable component has increased about 50 per cent.
Hydro is still the biggest - but all the growth has been in wind and photovoltaics.
To understand the scope of this problem - eliminating liquid fuels from passenger cars using renewable electricity - you would need to magic up more than double either the current number of wind farms or hydro power stations.
Or you could do it with four times as many rooftop arrays on homes and businesses - provided that electricity was used exclusively for re-charging cars - and not also for running your air conditioner, or the refrigerator.
Or you could do it with 40 times the current number of large-scale solar power plants we currently have.
Ordinary Aussie battlers have embraced solar power with ten times the enthusiasm of the politician arseholes who are supposed to represent us.
And this is the most disgraceful thing about our grid, and why EVs are a square peg in the black hole of Australia, at least for now.
Rooftop solar is, like, a referendum on who wants clean energy, where you vote not only with a pen, but also with your wallet. And it’s fair to say the results are in.
Ordinary ‘Strayans acknowledge that the world - and our part of it in particular - is awash in sunlight. Far more energy than the human race requires.
But more than a decade of governments and (I dunno, 30 - whatever it is) mentally retarded prime ministers remain spectacularly disengaged from us, and breathtakingly uninformed on anything technical or scientific.
There is 10 times more electricity being generated from small scale rooftop solar on people’s houses here in Shitsville than by the kinds of massive photovoltaic projects only governments can build - owing to cost, scale and amortisation criteria.
Investing in the future is the classic governmental responsibility, because it’s something at which the free market is shit, and it’s out of reach of individuals.
Of course, that’s something a government does, only if it is not down on its knees and bobbing its head enthusiastically in the direction of the coal industry, and run by embarrassing dickheads.
So no - as with most things, the products themselves - the electric cars in this case - are either here now or on the cusp of being here, and the infrastructure is at least a decade away from being ready.
And we in the electorate deserve better than that.
0 Comments