If there's anywhere in the world that solar makes sense, it's Australia. Vast stretches of land, more sunshine than you can throw a stick at. Good to see it's starting to happen.
This farm grows a huge amount of tomatoes in the desert. It has its own water desalination plant powered by solar. Unlike most of the stuff you see, this isn't PV solar generating electricity, but just a bunch of mirrors pointed at a single point to collect a huge amount of heat to generate fresh water.
Just look at the land in the photo on wikipedia and imagine how much food could be produced in this space.
But they can chuck the leftover salt back into the ocean. That's harder to do away from the coast.
Unfortunately we have a government that has so clearly been bought and paid for by the existing money.
Our Prime Minister brought coal into Parliament and extolled it's virtues, going on and on about how it's the future. Right now they're building a $600M gas power plant[1], and Victoria is the only jurisdiction in the world where you are actively fined for driving an EV. [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/23/solar...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-22/victoria-electric-veh...
Hyperbolic statements like this are unhelpful; The government has implemented a distance based tax on EVs (road pricing) to offset losses from the existing fuel excise taxes. It's certainly not progressive but it is not and never has been a "fine"
Having it be distance based is because there is currently a petrol tax that is also distance based, because it is per litre of fuel.
What should happen is that all vehicles should have the same distance based fee applied, with the additional cost of the CO2 output as a multiple. Make EVs the base fee.
Oh, wait, that's exactly what Victoria has done: https://www.solar.vic.gov.au/zero-emissions-vehicle-subsidy
Personally, I'd keep the EV tax as is, remove the subsidy, and significantly increase the ICE tax. Cars are awful, and their negative externalities don't stop at CO2 emissions.
To do it properly, you’d need different zones (higher charge in congested areas for example), but that would require creepy GPS tracking, or creepy ANPR everywhere. Really not a road we want to be going down as a society I think.
They could just double the cost of rego for everyone if they’re so concerned about not getting a tax they don’t get already (Fed Govt does).
The only major difference is that sometimes you can not avoid going pass a road toll. However the same can also be said about finding a parking space, and parking data is likely much more detailed information than passing the edge of a traffic zone. Many parking spaces in the city where I live have also moved over to use ANPR, which kind of mean the two concepts has already merged to a degree.
The per km thing is a bit creepy even if it's just reading the odometer, and as you say a bad deal for regional residents.
It's also very viable to not own a car in the city. I don't have one. But in the country, what behavior are you trying to encourage? So that complicates things.
It should probably be means tested too.
I just object to the idea that EVs should be subsidized rather than ICEs punished. It puts the finger on the scale away from even better solutions like riding, walking or public transport.
We already pay registration fees which are supposed to be a road usage tax. While they have cried poor about the loss of a tax they don’t even collect, at the end of the day this is literally just a cash grab by some States. (Luckily mine isn’t even talking about doing it, but I just think anything to discourage EVs is so idiotic policy and I really hate it being justified by half-truths and misleading info about the fuel excise).
The EV tax is a new, different, and not equivalent tax. They’ve hastily brought it in now before enough people have EVs to realise - which explains why it’s so badly designed (take, for instance, rural drivers that need to drive much further distances than city folk but have worse maintained roads and don’t really cause significant road wear or congestion. They’ll pay far more than the city dwellers! Or if you drive half the time in a different state, like people in regional areas who live on the border, you’ll pay a state tax for driving on another state’s roads!).
Australia should be subsidising EV purchases, not hastily implementing a new tax that further suppresses progress in a country falling ever further behind the rest of the world.
If I look at the rules here in Sweden I find that EV owners also have to pay a car tax as any other car owners. They do get the first 5 years as free as tax bonus, but after that they pay just as any other car owner. The tax is a base value (~36$ per year) and then an additional value based on the emissions and attributes of the car.
Car ownership is taxed because there is road usage, parking, health care, and other costs associated with car ownership. There are also pollution created by the wheels, oils, cleaning products, and so on. To be honest, 36$ per year seems pretty cheap as a base value considering all the cost to society and should probably be raised when more cars become EV and less money is gotten from gas and car taxes. The alternative is to raise other taxes like income in order to fill the gap in the budget or lower the budget of road maintenance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_registration#Aus...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_primary_a...
Of course Australia also sells a lot of bauxite to China.
The answer I got was that smelters are hugely expensive and last longer than the mines, and so it makes sense to build the smelter near the factories, and ship the raw materials to the smelter from wherever they are being mined currently, rather than building the smelter near the mines and then having to ship raw materials there anyway once the mines run out. I've always thought this was a bit dubious (why is commercially viable to build smelters in Korea but not Aus?), but it does kinda make sense.
So the problem isn't "not enough excess power" but "insufficient infrastructure" coupled with "insufficient government willpower to build a decent manufacturing base here".
https://www.aemc.gov.au/hydrogen-new-australian-manufacturin...
Ultra high voltage DC ultra long distance submarine cables.
If you have a lot of energy and iron, a great way to combine the two is steel. Sweden is currently experimenting with the idea of green steel, using hydrogen as an replacement for coal.