Far and Wired
The idea of our rural roads and highways being wired up with electric-car charging stations appeals only to inner-city dreamers.
Utopians care as much about building a world of perfect things as they do about a world of perfect people. In their vision of a society less chaotic than our own, a joyful population lives harmoniously in a clean, efficient and sparkling new built environment under the benign rule of an omnipotent government.
Politicians who espouse such visions can usually attract a significant number of followers by emphasising that such “progress” is “inevitable”. But even the boldest of them are reluctant put a price on their projects.
Labor, however, has done exactly this with its dream to force Australians to drive electric cars, and it's not cheap. Its Climate Change Action Plan, featuring a modern-looking portrait of Bill Shorten in a crisp white shirt against a bank of solar panels on the cover, includes the cost of building a modest network of electric-vehicle (EV) recharging stations in rural Australia.
“Labor will invest $100 million to match industry as well as state and local government proposals, building up to a $200 million fund in total, to deliver around 200 fast charging stations,” it says. “This fund will target rural and regional Australia and Australia’s most critical road corridors to encourage the take up of electric vehicles.”
The policy might well excite the imaginations of inner-city folk as they pedal along the bicycle-lanes, but it is unlike to solve transport problems of rural voters in utes.
Even the least nomadic denizen of our densely populated cities knows that the biggest obstacle to making Australia the new Norway, where EV uptake is high, is not sticking recharging stations in Westfield carparks but spacing them out on our wide, open rural roads and highways.
And at $1 million per charging station, the return in terms of efficiencies and long-term savings would need to be very high.
Rick Wilson, the Liberal MP for O’Connor, in Western Australia, one of the largest electorates in the world (870,000 square kilometres), is more than sceptical. “It’s completely impractical,” he says.
Firstly, EVs are too expensive. “You can build as many charging stations as you like but nobody will use them until the price of the cars comes down.”
Second, if the plan is to convert all road users to EVs, then it will take more than a few recharging stations.
He cites the town of Williams, roughly halfway along the 400km trip from Perth to Albany. Four thousand cars travel through the town a day, mostly during business hours.
If even half of them needed to recharge (which is likely, given that EVs have a range of only about 200km), and arrived evenly across a 12-hour period, then 166 cars every hour would be pulling up at the town's fancy wall socket.
Third, this will require an enormous overhaul of the power grid, which already occasionally succumbs under the existing strain. The current source is the Collie power station, next to the Collie coal mine, but Labor’s policy dreamers would probably prefer to ignore this detail.
The problem here is not just that Labor is trying to forge the future, but that to do so requires politicians to pick a technological winner. There are currently four possible energy sources for our cars of the future: hydrogen (which Japanese politicians are currently backing, having given up on EVs); fuel-efficient petrol and diesel; hybrids; and EVs.
In its haste to sign Australia up to its vision, Labor is predicting that the technology that will emerge the cheapest and most efficient is electricity. Sadly we’ve heard that sort of talk before.
The last Labor government told us the National Broadband Network would be a natural monopoly, as it would have been if technology had stood still.
Now, thanks to the private sector, Australia is blessed with the fourth fastest mobile broadband in the world, making the NBN increasingly obsolete. Soon it will face even stronger competition with the arrival of 5G.
And nobody, as far as we know, is stopping off at Williams looking for somewhere to plug in their computer.