Australia’s energy transition
Electric vehicles – thinking beyond cars
Australia has an aged truck fleet
Transport accounts for 18 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. After nine years of neglect from Coalition governments we at last have a national electric vehicle strategy.
Writing in The Conversation – Australia’s adoption of electric vehicles has been maddeningly slow, but we’re well placed to catch up fast – Scott Dyer of the University of Technology Sydney notes that there has been a rapid uptake of medium-sized electric cars. We still have some way to go in terms of charging infrastructure (particularly in apartment blocks), life-cycle battery management, and training a workforce to maintain electric vehicles.
The other gap in our EV policy relates to trucks. The company Adiona Tech, a company specializing in vehicle fleet decarbonization, has issued a report on transport electrification priorities, pointing out that the national EV strategy is geared entirely towards passenger vehicles, while overlooking the biggest greenhouse gas emitters on the road. It summarizes its report with a reminder:
Every battery we put in a truck or van counts for 5 to 50 households buying an EV, and businesses often have hundreds of vehicles. Australia must prioritise the electrification of vehicles that are on the road most, travel the longest distances, and are the least fuel efficient.
Commercial delivery vehicles – everything from vans delivering parcels through to road trains – account for 39 percent of Australia’s transport emissions. Some of the best returns in reducing emissions are to be gained by electrifying the largest vehicles which travel the greatest distances.
On last week’s Saturday Extra Geraldine Doogue interviewed two people closely involved in clean commercial vehicles – Martin Merrick of Volvo Australia, a company that has an electric version of every commercial vehicle in its range, and Tony Fairweather of SEA Electric, a firm that retrofits commercial vehicles with electric drive trains. They noted that zero-emission trucks, mainly electric but also hydrogen fuel cell, were prominent at this year’s Brisbane Truck Show. (15 minutes)
They too are concerned that the government has largely left trucks out of its EV policy. They draw attention to a regulatory impediment relating to axle load limits. At present truck front axles cannot exceed a load limit of 6.5 tonnes, but because of the need to carry batteries electric trucks carry more weight in the prime mover. They seek to have this limit lifted to 7.5 tonnes. (Are our intersections, where trucks stop, strong enough?) They also note that the US has a friendlier regulatory environment for electric commercial vehicles than Australia.
Giles Parkinson, writing in The Driven, provides some comparisons of Australia’s path to commercial vehicle electrification with initiatives in other countries: Electric trucks make inroads, but diesel still rules on Australia’s highway to emissions hell.
The message from businesspeople talking about electric trucks is that they have to push the government into taking serious action to deal with climate change. That’s a reminder that there is no such thing as a homogeneous “business community”. There are some old established companies and small business lobby groups, many with close connections with Coalition politicians, who resist government moves to deal with emissions. But there are also many technologically progressive firms and energetic entrepreneurs who are making less noise in Canberra and are getting on with the job.
Thus has it always been with structural change: when they pay too much attention to lobby groups governments let down the more go-ahead businesses.
Can we revive our car-making industry?
Timothy Minchin, of La Trobe University, believes that the change to electric vehicles can help us resurrect our car manufacturing industry.
His Conversation article Made in Australia? The electric vehicle revolution gives us a chance to revive an industry presents a strong case for re-establishing a car industry in Australia.
The conventional wisdom that has influenced policymakers in successive Australian governments is that a firm in the industry must achieve annual production of around 500 000 to 1 000 000 to break even. Those figures are unrealistic in view of a total Australian vehicle market of around 1 000 000, of which only 700 000 are passenger vehicles.
But perhaps these figures on scale economies need revisiting. The drive train of an internal combustion vehicle is an extraordinarily complicated piece of engineering, involving casting and precision machining of hundreds of components. Electric vehicles, in some ways, are mechanically simpler, but electronically more complicated. The scale economies may be quite different.
The electric car industry we might develop in the 2020s would be very different from the vertically-integrated and labour-intensive industry developed in the postwar years, behind high tariff barriers, with too many companies (at one stage 7) trying to make cars. It could be more like the industry envisaged by the Hawke-Keating government – an industry integrated into world componentry supply chains. Realization of that industry was thwarted by a wildly fluctuating Australian dollar and by Coalition governments gripped by a visceral dislike of anything that could be called an “industry policy”.
An optimistic note
There is no physical reason the world cannot completely displace fossil fuels from the global economy by 2050.
Andrew Blakers of the ANU School of Engineering points this out in a Conversation article Despairing about climate change? These 4 charts on the unstoppable growth of solar may change your mind.
His charts show that renewable sources, particularly solar, are on an extraordinary path of compound growth worldwide.
He also points out that in terms of per-capita renewable energy generation Australia is up there with the best European countries, the only difference being our comparatively heavy reliance on solar energy, while in Europe wind energy dominates. That difference is a function of latitude and land availability.
Blakers is also optimistic about Snowy 2.0, in spite of its problems. In another Conversation article – I’m not an apologist for the Snowy 2.0 hydro scheme – but let’s not obsess over the delays and cost blowouts —he defends the scheme. He writes that “the hold-up won’t noticeably slow the transition to renewable energy. The shift is driven by the compelling price advantage of solar and wind over coal and gas.”
Its cost blowout is unfortunate. At $2 billion, as originally estimated, it was almost too good to be true, but even at $9 billion, it is “still small compared to the $17 billion Australia spends collectively each year on rooftop solar, windfarms, solar farms, electricity storage and powerlines.”
Snowy Hydro boss Dennis Barnes is understandably another defender of the project, even if he is unable to explain why $100 million spent on underground mapping was unable to protect against the tunnel boring machine becoming stuck in unstable ground. He is more optimistic about the scheme than its former boss, who asserts that the government’s 80 percent renewable energy target is bullshit.
Short haul flights
On Tuesday in France a ban on short haul flights came into effect. Domestic flights that can be covered by train in less than two-and-a-half hours are prohibited. This will go some way towards reducing airline emissions. Short-haul flights are particularly energy intensive, because a large proportion of fuel is consumed in getting a plane up to its flight level. In reducing flight movements the ban should also reduce airport congestion.
Because France has a high-standard train system, a lot of distance can be covered in two-and-a-half hours, including the 590 km trip from Paris to Bordeaux, for example. That’s pretty close to the 660 km from Canberra to Melbourne. If Australia had a proper train system flights such as Sydney-Newcastle and Sydney-Canberra could be scrapped.