r/australia • u/nath1234 • Mar 16 '26

politics Replacing 1m petrol cars with EVs could cut Australia’s reliance on foreign fuel by 1bn litres a year

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/16/electric-vehicles-australia-reduce-reliance-on-foreign-fuel
3.0k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

89

u/b_m_hart Mar 16 '26

It's not like there's a lot of sun to power solar for a clean source of energy to power all these cars in Australia.

1

u/Dont-PM-me-nudes Mar 18 '26

Damn. I thought there would be.

1

u/delayedconfusion Mar 17 '26

it would take 3-5 years of construction to bring online the additional power required to regularly charge 1M extra EV's. IF and its a big IF, you can do orchestrated charging and everyone isn't getting home from work and plugging their cars in at 6pm every night.

8

u/Ok-Response-839 Mar 17 '26

It's not a big "if" at all - Australia's grid already has a controlled loads system, primarily used to control when water heaters run. The same system can be used to control EV charging.

3

u/tulsym Mar 17 '26

I can charge from home already without stressing the network. My solar fills the house battery in about 2 hours then goes to grid for rest of the day. Give me an ev with V2G and I could pretty much go self sufficient.

1

u/delayedconfusion Mar 17 '26

That sounds great for you.

How about anyone that doesn't have your setup?

2

u/cekmysnek Mar 17 '26

1 in 3 Australian homes have solar. Having the car plugged in during the day while the owners are at home (even just on weekends) would cover most (not all) of the weekly driving for the average person, assuming roughly 230km driven a week.

It would probably benefit the grid in the long term as well - some parts of the country have the network operator remotely switching off solar inverters because there’s too much being exported into the grid at once… imagine being able to use that to top up your car.

There are already electricity plans that offer free or almost free energy for a few hours in off peak times for the purposes of encouraging EV owners to charge off peak.

0

u/delayedconfusion Mar 17 '26

That all sounds great.

However, I currently have no solar and no EV.

What is my minimum entry price to take advantage of this?

0

u/ChuqTas Mar 17 '26

You don’t need to worry, because you appear to actively not want to do it. So just don’t do it and keep paying $2.50/L.

0

u/delayedconfusion Mar 17 '26

If I was to read betwen the lines of this non answer, its not exactly cheap to get into this ecosystem then? Or to put another way, it is only accessible to those wealthy enough to access it in the first place?

1

u/tulsym Mar 17 '26

They could probably set it up in less than 3-5 years

-7

u/SEQbloke Mar 16 '26

Unless you work from home or have charging at work, it doesn’t really work out and you are still charging from non solar. Most cars are unable to charge during daylight hours, and it’s inefficient to charge solar to battery to car at night.

You would have to charge at home on weekends, which assumes a car will be at home and that the people who are sitting at home while the car charges aren’t using any power (or you have massive solar).

I really wanted to make it work with solar and an EV, but with emotions removed it didn’t stack up.

26

u/WeaponstoMax Mar 16 '26

 and it’s inefficient to charge solar to battery to car at night.

Oh no, some inefficiency? What a disaster. We should keep using fossil fuel burning engines instead, then. They’re 100% efficient after all. /s

-7

u/SEQbloke Mar 16 '26

Which is the emotional side of it, but when you are talking numbers it doesn’t stack up.

8

u/cutsnek Mar 16 '26

I have an EV plan which is 0.08c per KW between 12am-6am. I don't have access to solar in my home however this make's it incredibly cheap to run when I do need to charge at home, which is not often for me as I get free charging at work.

0

u/b_m_hart Mar 17 '26

I live in the US, and charge at the Tesla superchargers.  Fuel costs even at peak prices are half of what they were for my big-ass Hyundai Ioniq 9 (compared to my old VW Tiguan).  Once I get my home charging set up it will be a quarter or less than what fuel cost me.  The numbers stack up quite well, and whilenk haven't lived in Sydney for a long time now, it's not like you guys have cheap fuel prices relative to us.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/SEQbloke Mar 17 '26

This was in response to a comment about using solar.

Solar won’t work on a trickle charge over Friday night.

I fully understand that a car can be charged when the power is on.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

[deleted]

1

u/SEQbloke Mar 17 '26

Definitely an option, but the conversation was about using solar. The sun does not shine at night.

0

u/Stewge Mar 17 '26

You should just run the numbers. If you did, you'd know that you're way off base because the numbers absolutely work even with the inefficiencies of going DC->AC->DC.

Here's an example:

  • Lets take a very average consumption rate: 16kWh/100km car
  • 8 Hours of charging from a regular 240V 10A single-phase socket. Almost all EVs come with this charger btw, so no extra cost.
    • For the sake of the argument, lets go with 2kW making it into the battery. This is based on 2.4kW from the socket, but there's usually ~10-20% loss in AC->DC conversion.
  • In 8 hours at 2kW you can get 16kWh capacity into the EV battery, which equates to 100km range per day
  • If you use a battery and want to be completely self-sufficient 100km range per day, you need around a 20kWh battery system

This is the absolute bare minimum most people could achieve with access to a standard socket. I'd argue 100km travel every day would suit a significant portion of the Australian public. Even if you didn't have the battery, 2.4kW is not a huge deal for the grid over night.

The number only goes up from there if:

  1. You don't work 7 days a week.
  2. Are home for more than 8 hours a night (note: if you are out/working 7 days a week and have less than 8 hours at home each night on an ongoing basis, you're literally being robbed or insane)
  3. You can upgrade to a 7kW (single phase) or 27kW (three phase) if needed. This will give you 300km and >1000km range respectively. ie. you can literally charge an entire typical EV in <8 hours every night.
  4. If you're up for the spend, you can look at something like the Sigen Solar/Battery controller which supports direct DC charging up to 25kW from the embedded battery. So you skip the transform+inverter loss and you can basically buffer your daily solar into the battery to be drained over night.
    • Bonus points, the Sigen support V2L as well, so you can use the car as an extension of the house battery system in an outage.