The foolish government in Australia lead by Scott Morrison has lost re-election, why is this good news and why should the rest of the world celebrate?
This is the politician who back in 2017 stated
“I mean, honestly, by all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the worlds biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country, but that is not solving the problem.
“That’s just trying to say, ‘bright shiny thing over here, don’t look at the thing over there’. Thats an old trick from a politician”
He Said “30,000 SA households could not get through watching one episode of Australia’s Ninja Warrior with his big battery, So lets not pretend it is a solution”
Now what is important is that this way of looking at it, is stupid. The idea of huge batteries like this is to allow solar and wind energy to be used when they are needed.
However, lest look at his statement on what this battery could do “30,000 SA households could not get through watching one episode of Australia’s Ninja warrior with this big battery”.
This program runs for 80 minutes, the average tv requires 0.0586 kw per hour, indeed a 75 is only using 0.1145kwh. The average TV is well under 75 inches but lets use this number to rub the point in. in 80 minutes the 75 inch tv will use 0.38kwh, lets make that 0.4. Therefore 30,000 tv will use 12,000kwh or 12mwh. The battery in New South Wales is 450 MWH so powering all these tvs will use 2.7% of the battery. Looking at it differently, this battery could allow 1.11 million households to watch a program of this length – frankly, it is baffling that Scott Morrison would have given figures that were so wrong.
New South wales has about 4.2 gw of solar installed – and with 2774 hours of sun a year, this should be able to generate more than 10 terrawatt hours.
This is a convoluted way of pointed out how ridiculous Scott Morrisons position has been on all forms of climate change mitigation.
So what should we make of the new government? He has pledged carbon cuts of 43% by 2030 – still way below what Australias fair share of cuts should be (which would come out at 74%) but a great first step. They are proposing investing heavily in Solar and batteries – the Tesla battery has already been shown to be a superb financial investment.
Australia has a 1.3 trillion dollars economy. It is totally conceivable to spend tens of billions to create huge solar farms. Indeed, if Australia spent far more, they could become a country which exports large amounts of energy to the energy hungry countries of Asia and make large amounts of money for the country.
Another need is to rapidly move the countries car fleet away from fossil fuels and onto electric. The new government must incentivise electric cars and heavily tax fossil fuel cars – and it is important to be heavy – the change must happen fast so that Australia can start catching up with the rest of the world.