Down to brass tacks as energy future unveiled

If anyone was to bust myths on electric vehicles (EVs), Russell Klose would be it. Mr Klose has imported used EVs from Japan for the last three years for reselling in Australia from his Yackandandah business and was one of six guest speakers at the Renewable Avenel Energy (RAE) Expo in Avenel on Friday 22 August. RAE is an Avenel-based group dedicated to welcoming in the renewable energy revolution and its inaugural expo attracted more than 200 people throughout the day. Faced with the oft-quoted fear that EVs are prone to catch fire, Mr Klose rolled out the bare facts. “We now have 220,000 electric vehicles on the road in Australia,” he said. “There have been eight fires; out of those eight, three were in a fire situation already, and three were a result of high-speed collisions. “One was arson, and one is still undecided, so you are 20 times more likely to catch fire in an internal combustion (petrol, LPG, or diesel) vehicle than in an EV.” Mr Klose said EVs were now coming with a ‘bidirectional’ arrangement whereby cars can be plugged into houses and have home appliances run off the vehicle’s battery. “But there's a couple of barriers to that. “Firstly, we need all the power companies that we deal with to be agreeable to it and make sure that they're happy with it. “You also need an inverter that will allow that to work, with DC current going into the inverter and getting exported as AC to run your house. “There are inverters made over in Adelaide – they are excellent. “And the other piece of the equation is to have cars that allow it to happen, and EV companies are cautious this may affect their battery warranties by having so many charging and discharging cycles. “The quickest way to fix that is with legislation.” Klose agreed with an audience member that Australia was building a dependence on China for electricity infrastructure. He said China was now an ‘electro-state’ with a lot of power but was also aiming for its own independence from the petro-states. “We are very dependent on what China does, but we have choices here as well; we've got a lot of the raw materials here, but once again, we export them from peanuts and buy them back at a higher price - it's what we do well. “We de-coal exceptionally well.” Keynote speaker Dr Karl Kruszelnicki agreed that Australia had a knack for exporting too much and manufacturing too little. “Out of the 200 manufacturing countries in the world, Australia is not number five or ten on the list,” Dr Kruszelnicki said. “We are number 135 – we're below Botswana, a country which doesn't even have a single motion picture theatre and yet they've got more manufacturing capability than we have.” Dr Karl spent the afternoon at the Energy Expo meeting with locals and hosted a long discussion with students from Avenel Primary School, before opening the floor to them (and parents) for questions that went in both directions. In the evening, it was down to brass tacks as Kruszelnicki packed his talk with the realities of carbon emissions causing global warming and solutions to reverse the change. He said the idea of running a household from a car battery was underrated. “The amount of energy you need to run a house is very small compared to the amount of energy you need to move a one-and-a-half two-ton vehicle.” He also outlined Mercedes Benz having invented a paint which acts as a basic solar panel and yet didn’t shy from the facts. “Mercedes says it'll do 20,000 kilometres a year, but I reckon it's about one-fifth of that if you look at the numbers.” Dr Karl also talked about the impact of climate change on the welfare of society’s youth, the amount of plastic in the environment, the Dunning-Kruger effect (which he confesses to have been a sucker to), and the exponential rate of solar panel production. “They were invented in 1954 and…they can generate a certain amount of watts and you either look at watts or kilowatts which is a thousand watts or megawatts which is millions or gigawatts which is billions or a terawatts which is a trillion . “It took 68 years to get to the first terawatt of total generating capacity and then to get to the second terawatt took only two years and getting to the third terawatt will happen sometime this year. “And the reason is that we are installing one gigawatt of generating capacity every 15 minutes in solar panels. “They're just taking off like crazy.” Founding member of RAE Jim Billings said the expo had been a great success. “It was such a coup to get Dr Karl, wasn’t it,” Mr Billings said. “And the range of speakers covered a bigger range of topics. “This was a huge event for Avenel.”

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