Lay off the power play
Government should not be driving EV take-up
How wonderful it would be to own an electric car. That was affordable. And
reliable.
My garage at home is festooned with solar panels. It’s the one part of my house that faces north.
The idea that my car could be charging for free when parked in the garage, powered by the panels on its roof, is a beguiling one.
If it could charge up in just eight minutes, as Bill Shorten rather optimistically suggests it could, well, that would be deeply exciting.
Imagine the savings of never having to visit the bowser? The price of a tank of unleaded would no longer be a worry, because I’d never have to buy it.
How good would that be? Mr Shorten has committed himself to ensuring that, by 2030, 50 per cent of all new cars sold in Australia will be electric.
Quite how he intends to achieve that target has not been adequately explained, leaving room for fears that, in order to see less fossil fuels burned, significant taxpayer cash will instead go up in smoke.
Voters have not forgotten that this latest grand plan is being promised by the same mob that said we’d all be getting super-fast broadband courtesy of the NBN. And we know how that worked out.
Mr Shorten has been ridiculed for his claim that cars could be charged in as little as eight minutes, but that seems unfair. It all depends what you’re driving.
A small car like a Hyundai Getz could probably be propelled by a couple of AAs. Perfect for suburban Melbourne. But maybe not so great for Queensland. Or for hauling goods.
Despite this, Mr Shorten has local allies in his crusade.
The State Government has built 18 fast charge points along the east coast, dubbing it the ‘Queensland Electric Super Highway’.
The stations include two on the Gold Coast, at Coolangatta and Helensvale.
Charging at one of these stations is free. Which is just as well, because a small electric vehicle like the new Hyundai Kona electric will set you back at least $50,000.
Among other reasons, this also helps explain why there are so few electric vehicles in Australia, and why, as of February, the charge points had been used less than 2900 times in their first year of operation.
Given that the network cost at least $3 million to build, that works out at a little over $1000 a charge.
In fairness, that figure will drop over time as usage increases, but if there was real demand for such facilities, we could surely expect the private sector to provide them.
The State Government, after all, does not need to run petrol stations. Why should it provide free charging points for vehicles that can only be afforded by the very rich?
They are already subsidising solar panels for those who can afford them, in effect paying to help well off homeowners to lower their electricity bills while battlers cop ever-higher prices.
Now it may well be that Mr Shorten and his Queensland Government colleagues are visionaries, ahead of their time.
Or maybe, just maybe, this isn’t really the business of governments.
Although still very low, the sales of electric vehicles are increasing. The Federal Government’s Renewable Energy Agency recorded that while just 2284 electric vehicles were sold in 2017, this was a 67 per cent increase on the year before.
The same agency also predicts that without government intervention electric cars will account for almost three in 10 vehicles sold by 2030. Which leads us to a genuinely radical suggestion for Labor politicians – don’t intervene.
Learn from the past experience which shows government attempts to move markets rarely succeed.
The NBN proves the point beautifully. Although its rollout on the Gold Coast remains far from complete, it is already being overtaken by solutions engineered and financed by private business.
While NBN engineers continue to toil away delivering wires through the ground to provide download speeds of up to 100mbps, Telstra trials of 5G mobile internet on the Gold Coast have reached 3000mbps – 30 times faster.
And that’s without a single cent being invested by taxpayers. The NBN, in contrast, has cost us an estimated $51 billion.
Mr Shorten is likely quite right to suggest that electric vehicles are a big part of our future.
If it means cheapskates like me can save a few bucks, millions will pile in.
If it means less pollutants being belched into our atmosphere, all the better.
You don’t need to be a farm-invading greenie extremist to see that vehicle emissions are no good thing. Try standing beside a busy road for a couple of minutes and you’ll soon get the picture.
Instead, I greatly look forward to the day when I can park a shiny new electric vehicle in my garage, and charge it via my solar panels. It’s a nice dream.
We are not at that point yet. One day we’ll probably reach it, and hopefully sooner than we think.
But it’ll be the next Henry Ford, not the next Kevin Rudd, that gets us there.