COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, was awkward for Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Despite pressure both domestically and internationally, he was not prepared to update the country’s emissions reduction target for 2030 or to commit to phasing out coal-generated power.
Why the hesitancy?
Part of the lucky country’s luck is its abundance of natural resources, including coal, gas, and oil. That means Australia has more to lose from the end of the carbon era than many other developed countries that are less blessed in the fossil fuels department.
A more immediate concern for the PM is an impending election in which he can’t afford to lose key coal-mining seats in New South Wales and Queensland. On Monday he was asked about UK PM Boris Johnson’s statement that COP26 “sounded the death knell for coal power”. Morrison was quick to disagree, assuring “all those who are working in that industry in Australia, they’ll continue to be working in that industry for decades to come”.
Of course, that message doesn’t go down well with the increasing number of Australians who are growing frustrated by the federal government’s intransigence on climate change. They vote too.
Given the electoral tension, you would expect the federal government to at least pursue those policies that would reduce emissions without threatening the coal lobby. One obvious one is encouraging electric motor vehicles.
19% of Australia’s carbon emissions are from the transport sector, of which about half are attributable to light vehicles. Currently, just 0.12% of those vehicles are electric. Therefore, the potential for emissions reductions via electric vehicles is enormous, subject to the source of the electricity used to power them.
That is why the government’s new electric vehicle strategy released last week came as a surprise to many. It does much less to encourage the use of electric vehicles in Australia than many were expecting. Behyad Jafari, the CEO of the Electric Vehicle Council, describes the strategy as “too little, too late”.
There are two major constraints on the uptake of electric cars in Australia. The main one is the availability and affordability of the cars. The other is the capacity to charge them, whether at home, work, or public charging stations. The government’s new strategy provides some assistance on the latter but does nothing to address the former.
According to an August report from the Electric Vehicle Council, electric vehicles constituted just 0.78% of new light vehicle sales in Australia in 2020. That compares with 10.7% in the UK, 13.5% in Germany, and a remarkable 74.8% in Norway. The figure for the US was 2.3%. [For New Zealand it is 6.45%.]
For the first six months of this year, electric vehicle sales in Australia rose to 1.57% of total sales.
Australia’s poor uptake of electric vehicles relative to Europe is due primarily to a combination of the restricted choice of available vehicles and relatively high prices. This is partly the result of an absence of subsidies or tax incentives and partly the result of Australia’s poor fuel efficiency and environmental standards.
According to the ABC, “Australia is the only country in the OECD without fuel efficiency or vehicle emissions standards for CO2”. Michael Bartsch, the Managing Director of Volkswagen in Australia, describes Australia as a “third world dumping ground in terms of automotive technology”.
It is difficult for high-tech electric vehicles to compete on price in that environment.
Furthermore, carmakers in many jurisdictions are subject to average vehicle emissions requirements across their range of cars. They need to balance high emitting cars that they sell with energy efficient electric vehicles. That encourages them to keep down the prices on electric vehicles in those jurisdictions. Australia has no equivalent regime, so carmakers are not incentivised to sell electric vehicles into the Australian market or to keep prices down.
The federal government’s new electric vehicle strategy includes neither financial incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles nor higher fuel efficiency and environmental standards. Therefore, it will do little to address problems with the availability and affordability of electric cars in Australia.
Instead, the government’s focus is on the second but much less significant constraint on the uptake of electric cars, namely charging capacity. The government is providing an additional A$178 million “to support co-investment with the private sector and other governments” in the nation’s charging infrastructure. The elimination of removing “charging blackspots” in the regions is a priority.
Public charging infrastructure is currently not a problem in most metropolitan centres and on most main road routes, particularly on the eastern seaboard. According to the Electric Vehicle Council, there are currently more than 3,000 public chargers around Australia at over 1,650 locations. The number of fast and ultra-fast chargers has increased by a quarter just in the last year.
Tesla is perhaps the best-known provider through its supercharger network, but there are many other players in this rapidly expanding space including Chargefox, Evie, and Jolt. Jolt recently announced the rollout of a A$500 million network of 5,000 free charging stations funded in part by a A$100 million injection from US investment giant BlackRock.
The state and territory governments have their own electric vehicle strategies. The standout is the NSW state government which, by its own account, “is investing almost half a billion dollars in tax cuts and incentives to drive uptake and reduce barriers for electric vehicle purchases over the next four years”. Incentives include co-funding charging infrastructure, delaying road user charges, and removing stamp duty on, and providing rebates for, electric car purchases. The latter are significant in that they reduce the cost of buying an electric car, the biggest obstacle for many would-be purchasers.
Other states and territories offer a mixed bag of incentives including subsidised charging infrastructure, purchase rebates, stamp duty exemptions, free registration, and interest-free loans.
Why has Prime Minister Scott Morrison decided to subsidise charging infrastructure but to steer clear of the issues of availability and affordability of electric cars? He claims that his policy is “all about putting this technology in the hands of Australians to make the choices they want to make. We're not going to tell them what to buy.”
That sounds consistent with the free market ideology you’d expect from a centre-right government. However, this is the same government that is prepared to subsidise new coal and gas-fired power stations. Perhaps the government thinks the latter is a bigger vote winner.
Ross Stitt is a freelance writer and tax lawyer with a PhD in political science. He is a New Zealander based in Sydney. His articles are part of our 'Understanding Australia' series.
48 Comments
Thanks to Scott Moronison, Australia will be one of the big losers of the energy revolution!
It's really such a shame! The country has probably the biggest potential worldwide to achieve 100% renewable energy (heaps of sun, wind, vast uninhabited landscapes, minerals & industry to build solar, wind).
Electric cars are not really ideal for Australia. The country is HUGE and people think "Just up the road" is a 4 hour car trip. Again it also comes down to cost, cheap petrol and electric cars are not exactly appealing to V8 Holden enthusiasts. Scomo is interested in the economy its that simple.
Thank goodness someone in the Western world still has the sense to allow people to make their own choices.. better than being forced and harangued into an EV. If enough people want to buy them, the market price will adjust to make it work - and if they don’t - there’s your answer. The invisible hand indeed.
I see putting petrol in an old car I have looked after so its still running well far less "wrecking the environment" than say cutting down the rainforest. A staggering amount of coal is being burned just so we can get electricity. There are numerous contributors to the problem, some are easier to solve than others.
In NZ, a brand new EV will put out total less emissions that an old ICE car in about 3 years (including the manufacturing emissions of the EV). So, yes, you are part of the problem. (Although the solution is not just replace all ICE cars one-for-one with electric cars - that's another debate.)
Is 3 years accurate, does it discount that most of Australia's power is fossil powered? I like EV's and they have a lot of positives, but I do think they get a bit of a free pass and the fact that the battery is going to need to be replaced at 10Y mark. We should be using EV's for short trips wherever possible.
Australia is subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of $10bn per year. IF they believed in free choice then it would only be fair to remove these then see what the market does.
Australian fossil fuel subsidies hit $10.3 billion in 2020-21 - The Australia Institute
Australia had huge subsidies for solar power at one stage , and I don't recall it been the end of a government. The actual number of people employed in the coal industry would be a small %. If they had a mmp style system , they would probably ignore them .
Hopefully the opposition provide an alternative to vote for.
Thank goodness the Australian government is not pushing people into electric cars. It makes no sense from the environments point of view to do so.
Only 24% of their power is generated from renewable sources which means that the rest comes from fossil fuels probably largely coal which emits up to 50 - 100% more CO2 on an energy per tone of carbon basis. generating electricity from coal is about 36% efficient and you loose a further 10% in transmission losses. Then the efficiency of charging a battery to propel the car is in the order of 70% efficient from the power plug to the wheels. Add all that up and you end up with a process that is only 17% efficient at providing transport from a fuel that emits about 50% more CO2 than petrol. It is far better to use that petrol in a Hybrid car that has a conversion efficiency of about 36%. VW have a prototype that achieves 45% efficiency.
Wholesale electric car use in Australia (and a lot of the rest of the world for that matter) will very significantly increase the emissions of CO2. We will very rapidly make the problem a whole lot worse.
Renewable power generation is the worlds largest challenge after our population explosion.
From this diagram, Coal-fired-EV-Efficiency — ImgBB (ibb.co), an EV is 39% more efficient than ICE in converting energy into motion across the end-to-end supply chain.
For electricity production, coal produces only 5% more CO2 emissions than petrol per kwh Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
OK. Starting with your first reference. It makes some pretty bald and unsubstantiated claims without any references or background supporting information. It looks to me like it has been produced to support the proposition of best case support for electric vehicles. The assumption of 80% efficiency for the vehicle it's self is at the heroic end of the 50-80% range of what is expected. Study the following web page which examines these options in detail and backs up it's analysis with verifiable facts that from my experience look about right. It claims that the mid range well/mine to wheel efficiency of a BEV is 20% and that for a petrol ICEV is 19%.
Next, the reference that you give for the CO2 emission between coal and petrol is just plain wrong even if it is a US Govt source. The basic science is that coal contains a lot of carbon and the energy comes from burning carbon to CO2 this is a relatively low energy producing reaction so while a proportion of the energy is produced by burning hydrogen to water a lot of CO2 is produced for a smaller amount of energy. Petrol and smaller molecule hydrocarbons have proportionately a lot of hydrogen bonds which yield proportionately far more energy. Hence fl petrol produces more energy for every KG of CO2 produced. The following geosciences paper shows the comparison of how much energy per lb of CO2 produced for a range of fuels. According to this coal produces about 33% more CO2.
Next the vehicle it's self. I was suggesting a Hybrid as compared to a pure ICEV. It was initially hard to find a definitive comparison between the two, but then I remembered that our own governments Right Car web site give fairly accurate fuel consumption figures for most vehicles. According to this site a Toyota Corolla Hybrid achieves about 3.6 L per 100 Km and the pure petrol version 6 L per 100 km ie the hybrid is 67% more efficient. On this basis alone a hybrid will blow the argument offered by your initial web site into the weeds, not withstanding all the other faulty claims made.
https://rightcar.govt.nz/vehicle-search-results?q=15|2630||
Using your source, the average efficiency of a EV is 70%`. This excludes regenerative breaking which increases efficiency to 77-100% Where the Energy Goes: Electric Cars (fueleconomy.gov)
The weight of the fuel is not important, what is important is the amount of emissions per unit of energy produced as it is the energy that is used, not the mass of the input.
There is also a big difference in burning at a constant high temperature in a power plant vs the variable load, lower temperature petrol engine - as determined by carnot efficiency
Yes, hybrids do better (due to the battery/electric motor efficiency above) but only while fossil use in the grid is high. The example above is comparing 100% coal-fired to petrol. In practice, no grid is 100% coal fired.
100% efficiency; really. No credibility.
Re this myth that some how we can attribute our present renewable power generation in NZ to transport if we add extra demand from charging cars at off peak times. I am presuming that you have read my words on this below, so I have failed to explain myself clearly enough. I will try again.
The present Hydro system has the capacity to act as a very substantial energy storage battery with storage capacity running to over a month for the whole country. If it is managed rationally and optimally there should be little or no energy wasted by spilling water or wasting the stored energy out of the hydro systems. Extreme weather and flood events being the only exception and within limits are unavoidable. (having said that, weather forecasting is getting pretty good these days so the hydro systems have more time to set up the hydrology for these events) Anyway the point is that no energy is wasted from the hydro system. If for example we are experiencing howling gales and wind energy is very high, then we have the ability to simply shut down all thermal energy followed by reducing hydro output and simply storing the energy instead. (further down the track when we have lots of volatile wind and solar energy hydro pump storage will enable to bank the surplus energy. But I don't think that we are there yet.)
As a nation our annual generation is about 81% from renewable sources and 19% from non renewables. Remember none of this renewable energy is or should be wasted. Lets put some example whole numbers to this. Say annually we generate 100 petajoules of electrical energy. 81 petajoules will be from renewables. Now say we add an extra 20 petajoules of load annually charging electric transport. Where is that going to come from? The hydro system is not able to magic up this extra energy because it already has no extra capacity or waste that can be drawn from. That extra energy can only come from non renewables. Sure there may be periods over the year when it will be possible to supply the whole grid totally from renewables, but that only comes at the expense of expending energy from the Hydro storage battery that will have to be made up at some point by extra non renewable generation. In other words on an annual basis, all that extra load must be meet by non renewables.
I could add at this point that my original statement referred to Australia with their 76% non renewable power generation, but as you can see it equally applies here while we have any non renewable generation. I shouldn't complain however, I have had a small fortune invested in Lithium stocks for some times and all this irrational exuberance for electric cars is just going to make me very very rich even faster. But I don't think that it is going to do the planet any good, and that is far more important.
Check this site out:
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
Although it's for the US you can poke around the various states to find ones with greater or lesser reliance on non-renewable generation - I think Nevada is close to the Australian mix, Utah and Wyoming are worse. TL;DR hybrid or EV wins out.
It probably depends on when they charge. If they were to charge during the day in Aus, the chances are they are using solar power. And if enough people do that, the more solar power will get deployed, either commercially or domestically. Again it can all be managed by price, and at some stage we have to stop allowing people to destroy the planet for nix.
The problem with many of the published analysis of the amount of renewable power generation for cars is that they make the artificial assumption that if we add electric cars to an existing mixed power generation system, that we can attribute a proportion of the renewable generation to charging the electric cars. One has to believe that the present renewable generation capacity will always be fully utilized as fuel cost is zero. (if we are using fossil fuels when there is free renewable energy available and going to waste then we have enormous problems that need to be addressed long before worrying about transport energy.) Accordingly if we have a generation system where there is any fossil fuel generation occurring and add extra transport electricity demand, then that extra demand can only be considered as being provided from 100% non renewable energy. (the available renewable energy being already 100% committed) It is only when we have achieved the situation that we are able to supply all the existing and extra transport demand from renewable energy that we can claim that the energy demand for transport is 100% renewable. Accordingly we can only sensibly add electric vehicles that can be powered by renewable power. The extra ones beyond that can only be viewed as being powered by non renewable power.
[citation needed]
You've also conveniently ignore the extraction, refining and distribution losses of petrol.
Even in China and India which produce a lot of power from coal, lifetime emissions of a BEV are less than an ICEV: https://theicct.org/publications/global-LCA-passenger-cars-jul2021
Australia is enormous. Frivolous example: A trip from Perth to Sydney is 3900kms. At current ranges (est. 300km), you'd need to recharge 13 times before getting to your destination. That would add a minimum of 13 hours to a trip that is already 42 hours. In To cater for different ranges you'd need at least 26 recharging stations between Perth and Sydney. No worries!
The longest stretch between charging stations looks to be 232km. Nullarbor to Penong with fast chargers at each place. Dicey with most vehicles on the market at the moment if you're only charging to 80%.
Yep. I'm a fan. But their fuel efficiency is very average on long trips, barely better than efficient ICEs. In town they reign supreme.
Charging technologies will only get better. Solid state batteries are the way of the future, both for range and for charging time. Just not yet
That's certainly been our experience with the Leaf, open road driving absolutely kills its already modest range.
That said, it seems to work for most of our needs because we've driven the wheels off the thing while the Subie barely comes out of the garage nowdays.
Depends on whether when you get there you want to go somewhere else, like a tourist spot 150km outside Perth, or stay for a week or so. Or take your family (non-infants pay adult fares). Rental cars are expensive. If the petrol price was high enough flying might be more attractive, but my ICE car can do 950km on a full tank, so the trip to Perth would take 3 refuelling stops
Sure I'd fly from Invercargill to Whangarei and maybe take a taxi from the airport. But not for a holiday, where mobility is important. The point it, EVs are fantastic for short trips or urban environments (most trips), but when you go off the beaten track (i.e. most of Straya) things are not as clear cut, yet. Things will improve, but not quickly. EVs have yet to beat the range problem for people who aren't urban commuters.
3900 km is what, 39 hours of driving, so you're saying it's common for people to spend ~8 days (there and back) just to get to and from their destination. I'd like to have as much leave as you get.
Also, say your vehicle get 7L/100km, that would be over 500L of fuel for the round trip, pushing $1000. With bored kids in the back for those 8 days plus the cost of 6 nights accomodation enroute, and I think most would go for the flights and rental car.
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