POWERHOUSE AUSTRALIA? Oz's global opportunity in clean energy & electric vehicles | FULLY CHARGED

[Music] don't forget our great ev giveaway subscribe and enter for the chance to win one of several electrifying prices including one of four electric cars [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of fully charged uh real joy for me this episode is and i think it's going to be very interesting to you very old friend of mine simon hackett australian lives in adelaide in south australia lots of stories about australia about electric vehicles in australia about solar in australia about minerals in australia now we're going to be talking about australia a lot in this episode obviously this is really an australian episode but what we should remember is how a huge the mining industry industries in australia now there's two things you can dig up you can take up minerals that you use to make things with uh you know iron ores you can get copper all those things or you can dig up coal which you then sell to other countries and they burn it which is what australia are doing by the gigaton without any question but they are also producing an enormous amount of very important uh materials that they're digging up and exporting it's a shame they're not using them in the country and making stuff themselves but their government isn't that sort of forward thinking it appears don't want to be too rude about the australian government but here's some interesting things australia continues to be a significant force in the global picture of the nickel cobalt industry now when we hear about cobalt we only ever hear about african children digging up cobalt which happens and is wrong but an enormous amount of cobalt is is mined and extracted in australia which we don't hear about you don't see that on the front page of various newspapers um the past 15 years have seen significant changes in the nickel sulfide industry with new developments mainly in western australia and the growth of an entirely new nickel cobalt industry based on application of new extractive technologies to australia's vast lateritic resources i don't know what that means but i think it means there's lots of it there mainly in western australia so there's an enormous amount of the materials we need for the for renewable energy in general and electric cars in in particular that are in australia australia is absolutely key part is the here's some the fascinating fact about australia it has uh 16 000 16 000 miles of coastline which means it has the incredible potential for offshore wind just phenomenal phenomenal stuff uh four out of five australians live within 50 kilometers of the coast which means if you produce a lot of energy on the coast you haven't got to transport it that far to make sure it gets to the people who need it it's one of the top 10 sunniest countries on earth which means rooftop solar is an incredible incredible advantage and has very very high adoption in australia those are you know just some some of the key facts about australia is the perfect country for renewables and for electric vehicles in particular and it is a little bit slow in the uptake or in fact consciously actively trying to dissuade people from having electric vehicles in australia let's now go over to simon hackett live from adelaide for uh long-term viewers of fully charged some of them will recognize you for when we did that we did when i was in australia and we did the episodes about red the red flow batteries and your office stuff to quickly go back to why how our we first got in touch with you as i read about you doing the holding the world record for the longest uh you know journey in a tesla roadster on one charge which i think does that still stand to this day it probably does for that car i would think it probably does for that car at the time we said it was the longest uh distance covered in a production electric vehicle which i think was true at the time right it was a three yeah so now that wouldn't be your case yeah yeah that's the issue right there's a 300 something kilometer range car on paper and we drove it 501 k's just to prove the point wow wow but that was from darwin to it was on that journey darwin went to ireland is that right correct it was on an eco event that was alongside the world solar challenge and so that particular leg was the one coming out of alice springs towards cooper pd and right conveniently there was a 501 kilometer you know mile marker i used the term mile loosely like 501 k marker on the road so we drove to it right we actually actually still have about 10 percent left in the tank i didn't want to be embarrassed it's amazing isn't it yeah it's incredible but i mean i suppose i think the the advantage i it was warm it the roads are relatively flat from memory of driving around because there's not a lot of sort of big hills you're going up and down no it's flat and no wind that's the thing yeah yeah yeah yes there is all those all those uh things need to be put into consideration but it's funny to think it's not that long ago that it was a surprising concept of people that you could drive a car from darwin to adelaide on electricity and i just did that drive to prove that you could yeah yeah but i mean now so last time i was in australia which was 2019 uh australian summer of and we drove a tesla model x from sydney to brisbane that time when we were visiting and it was it was easy then you know and because i think people outside australia you might if you if you're you know electric vehicle aficionado you would think that there's like five electric cars in the whole of australia but there actually is a tesla supercharger network in australia yeah there is for teslas tesla's around and and there's now a few other there's some high-speed charging networks being put in by some states in australia too um in fact tasmania's got an extensive um high-speed dc charging network sa has just put out sa government's just put out a tender to do the same thing so that's great it's it's starting to happen so there's there's a strange dichotomy in australia some things are working really well charging network's good um taxes on eb is bad you know it's it's a strange kind of pairing because the taxes on evs that's victoria is that the victorian state or is that uh it is victoria yeah it's victorian state but it's not only that there's multiple states that are dancing with that and victoria is having the first crack at it um but they're not the only ones talking about doing that that about installing various sorts of road user taxes through evs and it's a curious thing not not as the people arguing against it myself included would say it's not that it's intrinsically a horrible idea it's just that it's early and it's just it's too early and too silly in a world where ironically the taxes embedded in petrol in australia don't actually go towards roads and they haven't done for decades they go towards general you know general income so yeah yeah user pays is rational but this is kind of a very strange disincentive yeah i mean it once electric because there's sort of over 50 percent of of private road traffic of course there should be a tax on them and of course you should pay to use the roads i mean it's absolutely that same but then i don't know what the percentage of vehicles that are purely electric in victoria is but i would guess it's fairly low it's it's yes it's it's it's probably yeah it's very low um but it's starting right i mean i've i'm i've done okay in business and yesterday i finished trading in my old 2015 tesla model s on a shiny new model 3 performance it's really nifty you know electric car the nice gentleman who unloaded off the truck said he delivered 60 in adelaide alone in the last few weeks you know of that one and the point is that 60 doesn't sound like a lot but they're happening people are driving these things um and it will happen regardless as i said to a lot of people robert these sort of weird early disincentives won't stop the revolution here the economics are in favor of this but it will slow it down and it's strange a country that is a leader in other electric things like rooftop solar to be such a such a kind of luddite in the in the process of ev encouragement we as a country are the country with the least incentive surrounding evs in terms of kind of first world developed countries there's a wikipedia page that lists incentives by a major country and you know you've got yeah of course there's a wikipedia page for everything yeah of course you've got norway and the us and then you've got australia at the other end that's kind of on the negative part of the barometer uh it's it's a really it's really kind of embarrassing place to be you know if you built what what we've just seen recently here um you know big solar canopies over a load of charges with a big battery behind the fence where you've got like multiple rapid charges if you did that in australia you know here i'm going to argue in i always argue in favor of solar and it does make a difference but it doesn't make as much difference as it would in australia and if you have the same setup in australia those solar panels are generated would be generating the bulk of the power you were supplying to drivers which means you've got a really viable business yeah you're selling fuel that you're getting for virtually nothing i mean the inve after the initial investment and it's just begging for it you know when i've seen people's well at your house but i've seen other people's graphs of their solar production in australia with exactly the same setup as i have here you know not like close exactly the same products the same right right now the same number of panels and they're getting they're getting so much more than i think today's a perfect example we've got crystal clear skies it's june finally it's gone warm yeah you know and australian panels that are the same as on my roof would be probably producing 20 to 25 kilowatt hours more per day right and then mine so you're right we're just an ideal country it's such a good place to solder i i i'm actually the smallest investor robert in a thing called the australian singapore power link which is right which is which is i i just love the audacity of it the concept's really simple which is why don't we export our sun you know and it's as simple as throwing gigawatts of solar in the middle of the desert in in the northern territory and shoving it all up to singapore and and when you say it like that it sounds perhaps easy or at least simple of course there's an awful lot of investment and work involved yeah but the concept is such a powerful one but yeah singapore wants power and they don't have the space in the land for the sun so yeah for the solar wow that is amazing but i do love that project because it's just sort of barking mad and it's just that idea it's it's a big host right it's it's like go export something other than coal you know just yeah yes use your name and make money i mean sell it for money and so the credit of the the people that have come up with it that initial um process isn't to build it it's actually to do the business case properly and to get all the permissions properly and to survey the the undersea path for the world's longest dc power cable literally so and thank goodness yeah and decided how far it is i don't know how far it is from the north coast is it i would imagine it when you fly from singapore to sydney it feels like a long one yeah even the electrons are tired by the time they get there no it must be exhausted yeah but that is uh i mean because i can't remember the scale of it but it was big so it is gigawatts gigawatts and some big batteries but mostly gigawatts of solar and there's a one of the startups involved is a company that specializes in the technology of deploying massive solar arrays fast um so literally and these things arrive on the back of the truck um scrunched up like a concertina and then just get stretched out on the ground and that's it they just sort of make a little make a little little z shape on the ground look a little concertina off they go yeah so that is amazing oh i didn't manage about that yeah but yeah we're a strange dichotomy in this country here in south australia where i am we are a world leader in rooftop residential solar um so much so that we are now also a world leader in what's something it sounds negative but it's not which is which is in katana right in i actually mentioned that and i thought oh good i can talk to someone about that yeah because it doesn't although initially it sounds sounds like well you're taking my toy away right um yeah but you're not you're stopping you're stopping the balloon exploding in the rare cases where you actually need to stop pushing air into it for just a few minutes just so everything can be bounced up and the balloon doesn't go pop and then you turn the noise back on again so it's totally sensitive yeah it seems because that was uh there was a story i found from uh late last year i think it was november december time sometime around then when the whole of south australia was solar-powered for one hour which i thought was a great yeah okay it was only one hour but the entire state so that's what i think 1.6 million one point eight yeah yeah and everything to do with them and the every hospital and factory and everything and we actually the the state is good it has a nice combination of solar and wind there's a lot of grid scale wind in this state um the the hornsdale battery up in the north of south australia you know the the very big battery for for our country and briefly for the world is mostly wind powered it's actually located at a windfall it was a very smart idea and so yeah those days for us we get days when not a cool mid-season you know day sort of transition season day when there's sunshine and it's cool and it's windy yeah yeah we just yes and so in fact there's a new interconnector that's just in the process of being approved from south australia across the eastern seaboard literally just to produce more places to send the good stuff out um it's great because you'll be producing more than you can yeah yeah we're routinely doing so um and the other the other state i'm fortunate to be involved in tasmania you've been down at my place in tasmania yeah um it produces enormous amounts of of wind generated right um and hydroelectric hydroelectric power mostly hydropower right and again is in net surplus a lot of the time wow that's incredible so much so that there's a new there's a company in hobart that makes um i can't remember the name now makes wave wave piercing ferries out of aluminium which is you know very energy intensive process but the power is so cheap and so green in hobart it's the right place to build them wow wow so you can have green green it sounds like a competition yeah it does yeah but then so then get me up to date on the batteries because i haven't you know i i was you know blown away by them and i don't i've not heard anything more recently i mean if the company is still going and you're producing batteries and it's they're installing oh red flow absolutely yeah um yeah it's it's it's going really well at the moment actually it's just made its largest sale and in exactly the right market which is in in california you know the place you want to be putting batteries in uh so there's a two megawatt hour installation being constructed at the moment that'll be about 40 miles east of la it'll actually be attached to a biofuel plant so a plant that produces of energy from waste and then and they'll be they'll be sending out extra power during the if the time when it's most needed out of the red flow batteries one of the questions we're going to ask is you know does it scale up to that level because that you know i'd seen it at your house yeah yeah exactly well that was the thing right now necessity is is the mother of many things right in our case this big deal meant that we we needed to crack the technology for how to scale those batteries as big as you want so we've managed we've sorted that out we've come up with an architecture that works that means you can have as many as you like and off you go and the thing that we've realized about those batteries often people say to us well why isn't why would you use a flow battery why wouldn't use lithium doesn't that solve all problems and the answer is lithium's bloody good for some things it's particularly good for for this for grid support services for short amounts of high intensity output power to keep the grid going where flow batteries fit in is what's called long duration storage and california in particular is really getting that religion out they're talking about the need for large amounts of energy delivered over four hours six hours eight hours twelve hours really doing the heavy lifting to shift sunshine into the night not just adjusting the grid but being the grid yeah and that's not a conflict with lithium that's actually a hybrid that works well with it we think we think you know to borrow the old steve jobs line right for for flow batteries to win lithium doesn't have to lose and vice versa there's a symbiosis in there there's a horses for causes thing yeah to keep murdering allergies yeah and i think the other one that i always like to you know remind myself and a lovely viewers and this is is that the the kind of intrinsic difference you know the whole reason that electric car batteries now we know last way longer than anyone predicted say 10 years ago is because they're never empty and they're never full you know they're buffered either end whereas flow batteries it's exactly the opposite that you actually i just love that you you need to drain them to nothing and charge them absolutely full and that helps yeah and again yes and their propensity is to want to do that at a relatively constant charge or discharge rate that again is about the long duration thing so yes they're much almost like miniature hydroelectric stations right in the sense that sorry pumped hydra in the sense that the same idea that you can take a constant amount of energy and move it over a long time base and you're dead right all the way to mt all the way to full every day that's the perfect flow battery application right the tide goes in the tide comes out fundamentally the flow batteries that red flow make the their sweet spot is to deliver there's a thing in battery technology robert called c right it gets me misused a bit right but it's it's the ratio of how big your battery is to how fast you can blow energy in and out of it right so if you take a 10 kilowatt hour battery like the red flow one it has a c value of about 0.5 which in english means you can charge and discharge at five kilowatts okay so the fastest you can you can you can drain it is two hours you can't drain any quicker than that you can get the 10 kilowatt hours out no faster than five kilowatts a lithium battery you could take a 10 kilowatt hour lithium battery and drain it you know and drain it in minutes you know you could suck it out you suck at 50 or 100 kilowatts from it so so yeah lithium lithium knows how to live fast and there is a slight implication there if you overuse that of it dying young right and the flow battery is a kind of it's it's it is literally the hair and the tortoise and what i'm saying to you is in the group there is actually applications for both the hair and the tortoises this is not a conflict it's actually a it's actually a synergy um so there's that um and i might just say if any of your listeners want to see a bit more technical detail about that i've been i've been uh put some more technical bits and pieces about it up on my own little blog site lately um on simon simon dot post a link to that um i'm just just yeah but if anyone's feeling the kind of incumbent flow batteries that's where you can get your geek on and the other thing that we're we're excited about here because it's clearly you know i mean many viewers all know my connection with australia through my wife but we're very much looking forward to october 2022 when fully charged live is going to be in in sydney which it'll be great i think it will i think i'll be surprised at the range of electric vehicles capture and get there i mean i think it's going to be some interesting stuff there will genuinely be a decent a widening amount of choice not nearly as much as you have in the uk which is embarrassingly interesting from my point of view at a distance but not the amount of choice yeah it is starting to happen like a lot of other aspects of this in australia it's happening despite silly government policy because there are enough human beings here that understand that's the future and and the manufacturers are slowly but surely starting to turn up which is great um and and i am starting to see other brands finally turn up so it isn't just tesla they tested to their great credit turned up very early in this country when when no one else bothers and as a result there's a decent number of those but but also it it's lovely to see other brands starting to turn up because there is no one solution we can also we can all see where this is going right that all the manufacturers yeah without almost without fail are all saying we have seen the future and it is electric uh and the only the only country that doesn't seem to understand that at a policy levels australia but the manufacturers will solve it anyway because after a while that'd be all they can buy yeah and it'll cost less so why wouldn't you run because i mean that's not complicated yeah well and flip managers you know that's really the clue i've been doing a lot of stuff in this country with fleet managers they've got they've got they've literally just looked at the cost of the vehicles looked at the distances they drive they know how far they go each day looked at the running cost and gone yeah okay we'll have electric so we've just recently spoken someone who's installing charging systems for companies you know not public charges but for you know you know and then now we now have amazon warehouses here with hundreds of electric bans not one or two at the far end with a green sign above the thing they're just all electric you know and they are saving millions millions and millions of dollars a year just all exactly let alone maintenance but that uh link you sent me about the byd van i know you've heard of that and i think that also leads on to another thing which is where is the byd van made it's made just just up the road from you in china you know so the chinese vehicles we're seeing you go this is the big real big challenge for european and north americans because like it like it or not the chinese manufacturing engine when it decides to make a thing it makes the thing and it makes a lot of the thing and this is now the thing one of the fully charged um your fully charged show about byd for me was a massive eye opener i was gobsmacked just gobsmacked yeah yes they are going from the bottom to the top of the range of everything electric simon thank you so much i can't wait to come and see you again i can't wait for a fully charged life in australia 20 22. that's really good looking forward to it but no really great yeah really great to catch up with you thank you so much for finding a bit of time today thank you well i really hope you enjoyed that episode uh it was great to catch up with simon um we'll be doing a lot more obviously about australia in the coming months as we build up well we've got another year and a half to build up to the fully charged live show in sydney in october 2022 really looking forward to that um normal stuff please subscribe two fully charged lots of really good shows coming we've had a little bit of a production uh bottleneck recently because we've got so many episodes recorded but there's some really great stuff coming out soon so please do stick around to see that obviously have a look at the patreon link that's beneath this there's also links to to simon's uh blog which is really interesting he runs a really good blog he's a very interesting man and that's it as always if you have been thank you for watching you

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 42,836

Keywords: robert llew, electric car youtube channel, why should i buy an electric car, green energy comment, grid storage technology, renewable energy youtube, new transport ideas, green technology review, renewable energy comment, renewable energy electric vehicles, electric vs ice cars, latest news on renewable energy, crowd funded youtube, kryten, fully charged show live, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged

Id: vJco59SHpQM

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021