- Australian Coal fires, Australian experience... Archived Message
Posted by David Macilwain
on January 2, 2020, 11:05 am, in reply to "Australian fires, NZ's experience"
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It's good to hear of your experience with the Nissan Leaf, which is at least a smallish car unlike the wretched Tesla, and in a country where most grid power is renewable it probably does make sense, even though I have doubts about the environmental strain and viability of the lithium battery industry. However, as someone off-grid for 30 years, with a small and very economical diesel Citroen, I have a good grip on what it means to depend on batteries charged from the sun. The last thing I would want in winter would be a car which used up my total output of electricity. There's a simple rule that I would make on electric cars in Australia, which ALL run on coal-fired generation by default, and consequently actually produce far more CO2 emissions than my little Citroen. That is, that when ALL our electricity, summer AND winter, is provided by solar and wind and pumped hydro storage, then will be the time to install more solar plants to produce power for electric cars. Until then RE power will simply be diverted from domestic use to charge car batteries. None of my climate action friends agrees with me on this, but then they don't agree on anything else either! They're all oot o' step! |