Featured Aussies Virtual Power Plant

Looking at a map, South Australia looks very rural, not usually a good fit for plugin cars.

 

This is the region that is having so much elec supply/cost escalation difficulty, having commited to shutting coal fired power plants. Also Australia has committed coal exports to China, so internal supply is limited (paradoxically).

But the other potential problem for BEV comes in when the elec is scarce and needed for other uses.

 

This guy starts off kind of goofy but he has a large solar system on his roof and has two electric cars the charges from them. I believe he is Australian.

 

Australia is roughly as big as the US with climates and terrain that varies similarly. On a trip there years ago(just after 9/11), I accumulated 35k frequent flyer miles just inside AU and never even got to the the west coast. What may work for a city dweller may be a laugh to one of the stations (ranches) where measurements are in hundreds of kilometers between stations. Even more difference than our coasts versus flyover differences.

 

isn't this kind of similar to the history of old fashion coal/nuke/oil/nat-gas fired electric generation? Power is needed, and so a facility gets built, either by municipalities or conglomerates .... & customers' bills pay enough to support that infrastructure - & maybe there's enough $$ left to invest in the next power generator. Only here, the power generator doesn't have to be part of exhausting non-renewables.

seems like Totota doesn't mind being the johnny-come-lately with their plugins .... contrast that to the list of a dozen tesla retailers down-undah .....

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G'day,

Just to add another Oz Tesla charging place - Coles supermarket car-park, in Cooma, NSW.
Noticed it while taking some Melbourne-based grandkids home from a visit with us in Sydney.
No doubt, these charge-points are in Cooma for the ski crowd who can probably better afford Tesla cars as Cooma is the last major town before the NSW ski-field. Despite climate change/global warming, it still snows for a couple of months on our almost 2000m high 'Alps' .

G'day Bob W.,
Just as the UK and the USA are divided by a common shared language, we here below like to call ourselves 'Aussies' (with the final 'e') so it took me a while to work out your 'Aussi' in this thread title was our 'Aussie'. My schoolboy German 'also' didn't help .

Meanwhile, back on topic.....

It's mostly desert (to descended Europeans anyway - the original locals were better adapted), the only "rural area" (where it rains) is the SE corner. So most South Australians live in Adelaide or relatively nearby to the east (wine grown everywhere) or in the SE corner. So the SA population distribution could be better for electric vehicles that it first looks.
Being quite hot and dry (sunny, cloud-free), Adelaide does seem appropriate for roof-top solar on the large scale. I wonder how effective large area solar panels on a house-roof are as passive cooling devices (being black and with an air gap between the tiles and PV-panels)? A benefit for the house-holder even if the panels are not the home-owners?

We wish . Your prairies are our deserts. Your lakes are freshwater, ours (when wet) are salt. The recent geology of the US gives you rain-diverting high mountains and volcanoes to refresh the soils (earthquakes and tsunamis a possible annoyance) - with only ancient geology, we're eroded flat and most nutrients have long ago been washed into the oceans. Scientists come here to study our hot-climate billion-year old rocks (Canada has the cold ones).
So we live predominantly in a few large cities along/near the east (Pacific) coast. Our cattle stations can be as large as Belgium but don't have a human or cattle population to match (camels, maybe). Our increasing urbanisation and city sprawl, already good for electric vehicles, should further benefit once the inter-city highways are 'electrified' (e.g. as per the Tesla map).

So, it's not all 'doom and gloom'.

David S.

 

so i went over to Home Depot yesterday for some wiring on the to-do list. Walking by the lighting section, what do I see.





Jeeez! What do I got to do to get away from these people!

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I guess you know what you need to wire now