EVs won't go prime time until their $45k minimum sticker price is halved. That's up to the car makers not Shorten. Other ALP policies are either suss or a drop in the bucket. Once a few hundred million dollars start leaving the country for 'international permits' even the true believers will question whether the money would be better spent at home.

Contrary to optimistic claims I think power prices will largely increase. That is because increasingly high priced gas will be needed to balance fickle wind and solar. Another big coal station Liddell will close in 2022 the end of the next parliamentary term meaning more reliable power is needed. Shorten has ruled out nuclear so he must have something magical up his sleeve.

Barge-in Bill hasn't given any more thought to his impractical and highly unlikely ‘50% EVs by 2030’ than he has given to all his other uncosted policies. How about clockwork cars, which you could get out and wind up when they ran out of puff halfway across the Ninety Mile Desert or the Hay Plains. There won't be any electric charging to be had.

“The danger (of electric cars) really came home to me when I met up with an affluent, long-time Melbourne acquaintance who lives in a street where there are six Tesla cars.

When they all try to charge their batteries at the same time, the power goes out in the street because the grid fails. Sometimes it fails when only three or four of them try to charge at the same time.” (Economist Robert Gottliebsen, The Australian).

Bill wouldn't have heard about that piece of information. He prefers ideology to real life and common sense. He and the jet-set global travellers (those hypocrites and big emitters) don't know that the average Aussie takes road trips for his modest holidays, and there is no way that recharging facilities will ever be able to cater for them. EVs make sense in cities, but they are not worth a pinch of poop in our huge countryside.

Besides, the way we are going, we won't have enough electricity to keep the lights burning.

There is hope, though, while we have young people who are not raving lefties talking common sense as Tristan Passer is here.

Electric vehicles are our undisputed future. Albeit the fossil fuel industry and some of the paid stooges will claim otherwise and see all kinds of yet to happen possible problems.

That said, the only real drawback on electric vehicles is both price and range. As we saw with colour TV's when they were first introduced were horrendously expensive and only the privileged rich could afford one. Now anyone can buy a brand new one with all the bells and whistles.

So, expect the price to come way down as more secondhand fleets are ungraded and the secondhand market swells with used vehicles

. As for range. One day not too far ahead in time the roads we drive on will continuously charge our vehicles as we drive. Much to the consternation of various brain dead rev heads. who will as is their want drive around the block revving their monster trucks to make as much noise as they can.

That is, until the local gas stations and motor retailers see that the side of the bread with their butter on it is served only by servicing the electric vehicle market. One apparently can recharge on fast charge, an electric vehicle to 80%, in around 25 minutes the time required to take a leisurely comfort stop

. Moreover, next-generation electric vehicles will be better safer drivers, than their human occupants?

With completely autonomous vehicles available in my kids lifetime and a boon for elderly drivers who will have their former independence restored by such technological innovation.

I think the Labor party has got it right and the conservatives should do to Labor, what Labor has done to them and borrow their better policy paradigms
Alan B.

ttbn, that "piece of information" has already been exposed as a hoax. Firstly notice that he hasn't named the street where this supposedly happened. Secondly, Tesla cars (and even EVs generally) are currently so rare that there isn't a street with six of them. Thirdly a home EV charger uses no more power than an oven, so it would take a lot more than six to cause an outage.Fourthly the company that manages Melbourne's electricity distribution has no record of such an occurrence.

A target of 50% EVs is not particularly ambitious - it's within the range the Libs are predicting will occur anyway, so their scaremongering shows they can't be trusted.

ttbn: You quoted: "The danger (of electric cars) really came home to me when I met up with an affluent, long-time Melbourne acquaintance who lives in a street where there are six Tesla cars. When they all try to charge their batteries at the same time, the power goes out in the street because the grid fails. Sometimes it fails when only three or four of them try to charge at the same time.” (Economist Robert Gottliebsen, The Australian)."

I'm very skeptical of this claim, it sounds like complete BS. Typically EV's recharge at home by plugging into a standard wall socket. So they are severely limited by the power they can draw otherwise they would "blow a fuse" (or for modern fuse boxes trip the switch). In these cases they can draw no more than standard appliances - eg: a kettle would draw the same power. So if it only took 6 cars using this sort of charging to black out the neighbourhood then it sounds look they have extremely dodgy supply issues. eg. If just 6 cars could cause it to fail then it would black-out every day as soon as everyone starts cooking in the evening.

However, I believe you can install special chargers in your garage, in which case they might draw more (I don't know the details but maybe they they use 3 phase if available or or maybe they can be specially wired to legally draw higher currents on one dedicated circuit) but it would still be required to be within the regulations/building code and should definitely not cause the local grid to fail.

The real problem with our electricity distribution is not that we do not generate enough to meet demand, but that lost from power plant to consumer and as around 11% as transmission losses and an average 64% as distribution losses.

All of which are paid for by the hapless consumer and the additional charges placed by the price gouging investors with their gold-plated poles and wires. Plus the charges placed by this or that government as their personal ATM's to pay for their entitlements, salary padding/incompetence?

If however, we stop burning coal to power steam driven generators and instead cook it to release the total methane content,.

Then send that to the end user as gas, where we can for one, eliminate most if not all the transmission losses and reduce power transmission carbon pollution by 75% in one fell swoop.

And given the flameless heat source is solar thermal, Eliminate all the moving parts that are the principal source of black and brownouts.

Moreover, given this scrubbed gas is then consumed in household ceramic fuel cells the carbon produced is far further reduced with mostly pristine water vapour produced as the exhaust product and endless free hot water one of the other byproducts.

Plus a 50%+ saleable surplus! As for paying for the system, scales of economy could reduce the cost of the ceramic fuel cells down to an affordable $5,000.00 And be paid for by a far more reasonable quarterly electricity charge, say 25% of current charge plus 10%, which would see the fuel cell paid for and completely owned in around ten or so years
Alan B.