In case some of you missed this; in the UK a study was made to see
how much battery storage would be need for the UK grid using real
world data.
Turned out 14,000 batteries the size of Sth Aus's battery.
Cost 850 billion pounds would be needed.

I was not surprised by those figures and anyone with some electrical
knowledge would see it straight away.
The problem is we need a parliament of electricians not lawyers!

SA has a UPS, good for a typical 4 minutes (for such devices).

Here is the link to the article I mentioned above,

http://tinyurl.com/y8aa6qhq

The result was a shocker
13,954 of these 129 MWh facilities costing £405 billion would have been required to back up UK wind and solar in 2016.

Whoops my first post was probably A$s not pounds.
If you halved the cost it would be up towards A$400 billion if used here.

As far as electric cars are concerned, subsidies are not needed.
What is needed is control of the price.
The Nissan Leaf for example the largest number of electric car sold
in the world, sells in the US for around $US30,000 before tax subsidy
and in the UK for about 30K pounds but here it is sold for A$57,500 !
That is about $20,000 excess markup.
Their other cars do not get marked up like that.
The Leaf is the largest selling car in Norway and having driven one
here it was a marvelous machine to drive, quiet, responsive comfortable
and I would have bought it except for the price.
So do not paint all EVs as Teslas, the Leaf has a good reputation
if you read the owner forums.

Buy a Leaf (second hand?)from UK and pay no fuel excise here.

Even without the markup Bazz, US$30,000 is still over A$40,000. There are a large number of fine well made new cars on our market that will do everything a Leaf will do, only better & easier for well under half that price.

The only possible reason for buying a Leaf is virtue signalling, which means only idiots would consider them.

I bought a low mileage 2002 Mazda 323 hatch specifically to carry my remote control planes to the local model flying club, & to drive around the paddocks, for the princely sum of $3500. I have been happily surprised at what a useful, pleasant, economical thing it is, & it's 700 kilometre range on a tank of fuel.

My lady likes it so much she often pinches it for the 400 kilometre round trip to mind our latest grand daughter, leaving me her new Peugeot.

The fact that I could have a succession of a dozen of these, [at least 24 years transport], with their very low insurance, virtually no depreciation & no battery replacement costs in place of one leaf makes a total mockery of a Leaf being economically viable transport, at any possible price.

Only political stupidity will get us into electric cars, without some huge breakthrough in the technology.