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Category: Environment

12/10/2025

Vehicle to Grid electric power is being discussed at last!

12 October 2025

Those following EV sales figures may be cheered up by a recent article stating that Hyundia, Kia, BYD and other EV manufacturers are exploring how EV batteries can be used to store electricity and top up the grid at peak times, earning power bill credits for their owners.

This has been possible for a long time, and one can only wonder if the existing big players in the electricity market have been delaying progress to keep prices high and let them develop their own batteries. Note that the energy companies are now doing deals with the car companies- I guess that was the reason for the delay- they want some of the money. They are pontificating on what was obvious years ago, as if they are Santa Claus.

Whether this article in the SMH on 25/9/25 means that there has been real progress remains ot be seen, but another recent article n Carsguide of 11/10/25 says that BYD is overtaking Tesla in sales and may bring new cheaper models including the Seagull (Atto 3), which might sell for as little as $25,000 before on-road costs. I had read in the financial pages that the Seagull costs as little as $US10,000 (which is about $A15,500) overseas so we can only wait to see what price we get.

Turning your EV into a giant battery is a step closer

By Nick Toscano SMH 25 September

Hyundai, Kia, BYD and other major automakers are exploring how batteries in electric vehicles can be used to store surplus renewable energy and top up Australia’s electrical grid at critical times, earning power bill credits for their owners.

In one of the biggest trials of its kind in Australia so far, power supplier AGL has begun working with car manufacturers to test technologies that could turn plugged-in electric vehicles into “two-way energy sources”, ready to inject rapid discharges to keep the grid stable and smooth out swings in supply and demand.

Connecting an electric car to a bidirectional charger, so its battery can feed the grid in peak periods, could be a powerful tool to support decarbonisation of Australia’s electricity system as it shifts from coal to less predictable sources such as wind and solar, energy companies say.

It could also make it more appealing for Australians to make the switch to electric vehicles by giving owners the ability to earn money from selling power in their batteries back to the grid, offsetting their higher upfront cost compared with traditional petrol cars.

The Climate Change Authority calculates that every second light vehicle sold over the next decade must be electric for the Albanese government to meet its new 2035 emissions-reduction target. However, achieving that goal may prove difficult due to a recent slowdown in electric car sales and persistent worries about the cost of living.

To unlock electric vehicles’ full potential, their owners should think about them not just as cars, but as “home batteries on wheels”, said Renae Gasmier, AGL’s head of innovation and strategy.

Electric car batteries, typically several times larger than household batteries, can store enough energy to comfortably power the average home for around three days, she said. But adding vehicle-to-grid functionality could deliver even greater benefits, enabling the battery to be charged when electricity prices are low and renewable energy is plentiful, and using that energy to power the owner’s home or export surplus power back to the grid.

AGL said its trial, launched in Melbourne on Wednesday, would bring together electricity distribution and network service providers, electric vehicle equipment suppliers and carmakers including Hyundai, Kia, BYD and Zeekr. Other automakers are in talks with AGL about the program but are yet to sign on.

The trial will assess the level of potential savings consumers could expect from using vehicle-to-grid functionality and seek to ease concerns that bidirectional charging may wear on car batteries, causing them to degrade more quickly.

Kia Australia chief executive Damien Meredith said bidirectional electric vehicle charging was a “game-changer”.

“Amid cost-of-living pressures, this unlocks the potential for Kia EV owners to transform their cars into mobile energy assets,” Meredith said.

Other energy companies are also pursuing similar initiatives. Amber Electric, a retailer that enables customers to buy and sell electricity at wholesale prices, launched a vehicle-to-grid trial last year with funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. Some participants in the trial were said to have earned hundreds of dollars in credits a month after feeding power back to the grid at times when prices were spiking.

Origin Energy, the largest Australian power and gas retailer, is building its own new retail offering around vehicle-to-grid technology.

The company this week said it had teamed up with BYD and StarCharge for a trial in which participants would receive a BYD Atto 3 subscription, a vehicle-to-grid bidirectional charger and access to a free charging tariff.

15/12/2024

Nuclear Power

13 December 2024
In the Nuclear power ‘debate’ Dutton is using the exact words of a nuclear power lobbyist who I heard at a Royal Society meeting last year. He says in essence that all the other countries have nuclear, so we need it too, which is silly in that we have far more renewable energy than they do.

So the message is the that Liberals have given in to the nuclear lobby, because of course a couple of nuclear power plants are necessary for the AUKUS submarines, though both Liberal and Labor have been carefully avoiding this fact, as they know that the Australian people currently do not support either nuclear power or AUKUS submarines and they want to get us to accept it all in two bites rather than one.

The hasty inquiry into nuclear energy, which I flagged last month conspicuously did not have the AUKUS submarines mentioned in the their terms of reference despite the fact that in discussions about the AUKUS submarines it was mentioned that Australia will need two nuclear reactors larger than the Lucas Heights one, and a lot more trained nuclear scientists and technicians. Labor just wants the Committee to find nuclear electricity unnecessary and criticise the Liberals.

The sad reality of our two party duopoly is that when one side is voted out, the other comes in with all the policies it wants to bring in. So if you dump Albanese because he did not do much and you think Dutton can help (not a view I support), you get nuclear whether you wanted it or not.

In countries such as Germany , where Winston Churchill wrote the constitution so that no single party could ever get a majority, they have to get coalitions so that each issue has to get considered on its merits. It is not a winner takes all and gives all the policies of whichever lobby group has been successful lately. It seems that the Teals are the only hope; the thin Teal line holding democracy

23/05/2024

EV Batteries are the Answer to Australia’s Electricity Storage Problem

23 May 2024

Everyday we hear about Australia’s energy problem. The government wants to be re-elected because it gave the electricity companies $300 for each of us to offset our power bills.

Less than a fortnight ago, the Government announced a new gas strategy. Gas had to be a ‘transition fuel’ because we could not transition to renewables fast enough. Fracking with its associated damage to the rock strata, environment and greenhouse gas targets notwithstanding Last week the Liberals announced a nuclear future. This week Erarang coal fired power station closure has to be delayed. And, hey rooftop solar is too much in the day time, so owners will have to pay to have the power taken off their hands as grid prices go negative.

Meanwhile it costs $50,000 to buy an EV in Australia, despite the fact that China has an EV overproduction problem and BYD can produce a model called a Seagull for $US10,000 (about $A15,000). An EV has a battery that stores about 50 kilowatt hours, whereas the average home battery is less than 10kWh. The spot price of electricity varies and it would be easy to charge the EVs on solar in the daytime and use their batteries to power the houses in the evenings. Why does this not happen? It does require standard plugs and meters that would allow electricity to move from the car to the grid. Electricity already goes from the grid to the cars- it just has to be able to be reversed.

Why has this not happened? The small number of electricity suppliers, who are arguably gaming the system by withholding supply at critical times to raise prices, do not want supply diversified. They are building solar as fast as they can and wanting to control the solar input. They even offer to put solar on your roof as long as they can control when it is used. If individual households could store solar in their EVs, and either use it or sell it into the grid at peak times, this would directly cut into their oligopoly profits. Why does the government not have the courage to take them on? Probably because solar owners and people who want to profit from the EV batteries in their cars have not made enough noise to make it a political issue.

So lets shout:

‘We want cheap EVs and we want to be able to use their batteries to store power for Australia, lessen greenhouse gases and make some money at the same tim.

When do we want it- NOW!’

07/03/2024

AUKUS- time to make a RUcKUS

6 February 2024

The decision to buy Australia nuclear submarines was one of the worst military decisions ever taken in Australia, not to mention the opportunity cost of $360 billion in terms of the useful things it could do to improve Australian society.

Nick Deane of the Marrickville Peace Group punches well above his weight because of the dire state of peace activism in Australia. He writes excellent material in a very understudied area.

He makes the point that a few submarines cannot defend Australia if it were in danger of a serious attack. But of course that much money could buy a lot of other military material, so we are actually a lot weaker for having the subs.

The other reason given is ‘deterrence’. Presumably this relates to China, but given the huge arsenal the US already has, whether a few submarines are Australian-flagged or US-flagged will not change their thinking one iota. China is a power that is going to rise whether we like it or not, their current economic problems notwithstanding. Anwar Ibrahim, the excellent Malaysian Prime Minister has pointed this out at the ASEAN meeting in Melbourne.

We are not going to stop China’s rise and we should try to get the US to accommodate this as they will not be able to stop it either. We should simply deal with China as a trading partner, not sell them our strategic assets and get a fair price for our wares. Their interest in the Eurasian continental mass will be far greater than invading a farm and a quarry of far less economic significance.

My own view is that it quite dubious whether a nuclear submarine will be of any use in any case. The battleships that fought in WW1 were rendered totally obsolete by their vulnerability to seaplane attacks in WW2. Submarines can currently hide because changes in water temperature make them hard to detect. Conventional submarines get found when they come up for air, but nuclear submarines can stay submerged for very long periods. But nuclear submarines produce a lot of hot water from their reactors, which they cannot turn off. If they stay in the same place quite a plume of hot water goes up from them. It is hard to believe that satellites will not be able to notice this temperature difference. The Russian Black Sea fleet is being sunk by numerous relatively cheap drones, and it is difficult to believe that a pattern of surface drones guided by a satellite would not be able to locate and then destroy a submarine twenty years hence.

The UK wants to sell us submarines and wants to lock us in on their side in a confrontation with China. But the US has other objectives. Apart from selling us submarines at vast profit, we will have to have a base capable of supporting them. Then they will be able to use that base, presumably at minimal cost, so we are locked into having US nuclear warships in our ports at our cost and becoming targets for China in the confrontation.

The pro-nuclear lobby has also pointed out that Australia will also have to hugely expand our nuclear knowledge capability with at least another reactor larger than our modest one at Lucas Heights. We cannot just have submarines and not be able to operate and maintain them.

The defence procurement has been an a mess for years, one suspects because some of our strategic planners want us to ‘operate seamlessly’ with the US, which assumes that our military policy is in total lockstep with theirs, and other planners want an independent Australian capability, fearing the US under Trump might go into isolationism as it did just before both world wars. What do you procure if you have not solved this internal wrangle?

So along comes Morrison whose popularity is sagging just before an election and makes a big decision that allows him to pretend he is a big statesman with a US President and a UK Prime Minister. Photo op a bargain at $360 billion!

Labor, ever-fearful of being criticised by the Liberals for being ‘weak on defence’ (or border security or tax cuts) has just gone along with this. And of course decades of dithering for the reasons above have meant that there is no properly thought out and costed alternative.

We need to recognise that the US will always act in its own interest as it did in delaying its entry to WW1 and WW2 and in selling arms now. We need our own defence policy and to recognise that the US may help us, but only if it has the resources available at the time and there are not other priorities. Once we have a defence policy, we can fix the muddled thinking and get a defence procurement strategy. But we will have to make enough noise to get rid of the AUKUS deal, which will tie up so much money that nothing else will get a look in.

Here is Nick Deane’s article from John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations:

How did Australia get seduced by AUKUS?

16/12/2023

Power: the 50-25-25 rule

16 December 2023

When I was in Parliament someone said to me that big business had 50% of the power, all governments together 25%, and every other power group 25%.

It seemed a strange concept at first, but on reflection, I think it is about right.

Only after revolutions does it change much and historians argue over for how long.

Senator David Pocock, the Canberra independent, spent a lot of time trying to get the Government to release documents between Santos and themselves about the Barossa gas development in the Timor Sea.

THe reason for this was the Environmental Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) bill 2023.

Santos is the front partner and 50% owner of the Barossa gas field with SK E&S, a Korean company having 35% and JERA, a Japanese company, 15%. They wanted to develop the largest fossil fuel project in Australia, (natural gas), just when Australia is supposedly getting towards net zero carbon dioxide. Quite apart from the fact that methane burns to carbon dioxide, natural gas, having been formed from the decay of carbon products, is usually found with large amounts of carbon dioxide in with the methane. The Barossa gas is worse than usual at 16-20% carbon dioxide. Santos therefore wanted a permit to separate the carbon dioxide, capture it and store it.

Jennifer Rayner of the Climate Council is one of the many environmentalists who point out that CCS, Carbon Capture and Storage has never been done successfully and is just a fudge to continue fossil fuel use. But it gets worse. When the carbon dioxide is supposedly all captured, it is to be piped to a supposedly exhausted gas field, Bayu-Undan, in East Timor 100 km away and injected into the wells there. What could possibly go wrong? East Timor is not a signatory to the Paris Climate agreement. And if that were not enough, the pipeline to East Timor will not be finished until 5 years after the methane is being shipped, so 5 years worth of carbon dioxide waste is simply to be exhausted to the atmosphere.

All thai was pointed out in Parliament by Pocock and the Greens. There is a carbon offset scheme, where Australian Carbon Offset Units (ACCUs) could be bought, but estimates have been that not enough of these could possibly be created to offset the amount of gas produced by projects currently in the pipeline and the price of ACCUs would rise. The Sea Dumping bill was passed with support from the Coalition. The Greens and Pocock held out, unsuccessfully.

The government resisted releasing the Santos correspondence until after the bill was passed and the correspondence said that Santos’ decisions had already been made and considerable investments undertaken and it would upset the Korean and the Japanese investors if the project were stopped or delayed. It seems that the Koreans and Japanese pressured Penny Wong and the Foreign Affairs Ministry and overcame Chris Bowen and the Environment Ministry. .

All this happened at the same time as the COP28 (28th Conference of the Parties of the 1992 Agreement)in the UAE (United Arab Emirates). UAE is the second largest economy in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia and exports 3 million barrels of oil a day. The president of the COP meeting was Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also Minister of Industry of the UAE and head of the Abi Dhabi National Oil Company. How anyone could have expected a resolution to phase out fossil fuels to come from a meeting so constituted defies understanding. The whole setting seemed beyond satire. The final text, which seems very hard to get actually agrees to phase down fossil fuels but gives no timetable and allows gas as a transition fuel, which is effectively a loophole to increase gas production.

Environment Minister Chris Bowen said that it was ‘no small thing’ to agree to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. But what is all this worth with no timetable and no commitment to phase them out?

Pocock is an ex-Rugby player. My local rugby club has the motto ‘Facta non Verba’= ‘Deeds not Words’ and Pocock is true to the breed.

He said ‘As a country we’ve got to make the choice. Do we put our futures and the ..future..ahead of the short-term profits of a handful of companies like Santos?’

The answer it seems is ‘Yes’. Santos tells the Labor government what to do, and the Labor government does it. The Liberals opposed initially as they usually oppose everything, but when they found out about what Santos and the Japanese and Koreans wanted they quickly came on board.

The rule about 50-25-25 seems to hold good. 50% quickly became 75%, then 100%.

It is very hot today, and summer is not yet here. It would be nice to think that next year will be better, but it won’t, maybe ever…

Here is the story in The Saturday Paper. You might wonder why it is not in the other papers.

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/environment/2023/12/16/emails-reveal-labor-caved-santos#mtr

23/11/2023

Climate Change- a Depressing Update

23 November 2023

In Australia the Labor government struggles mightily to get legislation through to allow Woodside to pipe carbon dioxide to East Timor’s territorial waters for supposed CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) to allow them to develop a new gas field. East Timor is not a signatory to the Paris Accord- convenient eh? Supposedly the carbon dioxide will be pumped into a reservoir that used to have gas, but Woodside has a track record of not meeting its CCS targets; if you think CCS is a real thing and not a cop-out farce.

Evidence suggests that the world is on target for a 3 degrees temperature rise, which may make human life unsustainable in its present form. Petrostates are installing lights at beaches so that people can go for a night swim to cool off because it is too hot in the daytime!

The graphs below show world energy consumption tripling since 2000 and continuing that upward trajectory. If one considers that the production of energy by a human is about a kilowatt a day, one realises that the amount of energy consumed now per person is many times that, and far higher in developed countries, the situation is unsustainable. The invention of the steam engine in 1690 and the internal combustion engine in 1872 and the use of fossil fuels, which has resulted in the energy and carbon dioxide stored as carbon over tens of thousands of years being released in a century. It is ridiculous to think that reforestation can capture this amount of carbon as the total area of forests in the world is still declining.

COP28 (the 28th Conference of the Parties) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will start on 30 November in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the UAE state oil company ADNOC. How much good is this likely to do?

COP-out: Why the petrostate-hosted climate talkfest will fail

17/11/2023

FB Post to School Students 4 Climate

17 November 2023

School students had a strike today and marched to Tanya Plibersek’s office to demand more action on climate. I posted this to their Facebook page ‘School Students 4 Climate’

I note your slogan ‘Take back the power’. This is good and very important.. While 2 political parties can both be bought by vested interests we will never have the power. The Swiss constitution has citizens able to get a petition and overturn any government decision at quarterly referenda. They have 3 levels of government like us, but any level can be overturned. Politicians are part-time and limited to 2 terms so they cannot climb at party hierarchy, and they keep their original jobs while they are in Parliament and go back to them when their term expires. They also have a number of political parties so the government never has an absolute majority and has to debate and negotiate over every bill. The Swiss model was suggested in 1898, but Aust. went with the US/UK model. The Swiss model gives power to the people. We should work towards it as a better model. When Winston Churchill wrote the German constitution after WW2 he made certain that no single political party could ever have an absolute majority. Look at how polarised the US and UK are and we are going the same way. We must get power back to the people, not the political parties. To get the power back we need a change to the Australian Constitution. It is a long-term project. Can the schoolkids do it?

18/10/2023

Advocacy to Delay the Silica Benchtops Ban

18 October 2023

I wondered why the NSW Government was delaying the ban on silica-containing benchtops until July 2024. Infectious diseases have no political friends, but industrial diseases do. Below is a full page ad in today’s Sydney Morning Herald advocating a delay on the ban and some regulations about how to cut the benchtops with no dust. They also point out correctly that other benchtop materials have some hazards, and there are a lot of other products that produce silica dust when cut or dug. And they point out that a lot of people are involved in installing benchtops.

It is true about other products being harmful. But it is also true that there are readily available non-toxic alternatives that could be used. It is a bit rich for an industry that did precious little to stop the development of silicosis now to ask to be regulated. The obvious solution is to minimise the harm from all sources of silica including cutting concrete and digging sandstone foundations. That requires regulations that often actually exist, but Safework does few site inspections and relies on ‘self regulation’ and a ‘notify us’ system of light regulation, based on a fundamental contempt for OHS as soon as it inconveniences business.

The government must be forced by publix pressure to ban silica benchtops, which are basically all silica except for a bit of binder chemical, and to enforce other regulations with filtered air and barriers with PPE (personal protective equipment) as a last resort. Concrete or sandstone must be cut with water on the saw so that there is minimal dust.

It is depressing, but not surprising that those who have created so much of a problem by setting up an import system for this toxic product now have the gall to lobby against effective government action.

C:\Users\chest\OneDrive\Pictures\SMH Silicosis Ad 231018.jpg

31/03/2023

UN Security Council Rejects an Investigation into Nordstream Pipeline Sabotage

29 March 2023

On 27 March the UN Security Council rejected a Russian motion to have a UN investigation into the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines on 22 September 2022.

Interestingly there were 3 votes in favour, Brazil, Russia and China and 12 Abstentions. No votes against! The abstentions were from the US, UK, France, Gabon, Switzerland, Ghana, Ecuador, Malta, Japan, Albania and the United Arab Emirates. The reason mostly given for the abstentions was that there are already investigations going on by Germany, Denmark and Sweden.

China’s representative pointed out that the UN investigation could encompass and cooperate with all these, and that blocking the Council from launching and investigation only raises suspicions that ‘something is being hidden’. He tactfully did not say that any national investigation would have to be filtered through that country’s foreign policy considerations.

Of course, the elephant in the room was the report published on February 8 by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh which claims that U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior White House staff ordered the Pentagon to take out the natural gas pipeline that runs along the Baltic Sea bed from Russia to Germany.

https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15243.doc.htm

15/03/2023

Fracking for Gas Destroys Farmland

15 March 2023

Some years ago, I was a farmer in New Zealand. I met a cashed-up American who was in NZ trying to buy farmland. I asked him why he was NZ rather than Australia. He said, ‘Australia is fuc*ed , mate. The governments have let them frack it all, and soon they won’t be able to farm’.

He was from the US and had seen it happen there. The problem is that politicians are mostly lawyers and accountants and do not know what they do not know. Perhaps they are easily conned by lobbyists in suits. The fact is that the surface of the earth is like a layered cake with rock strata that stop water simply going to the lowest level. If an underlying impermeable level is broken, the water which may have been kept in the overlying soil drains to a deeper level. So big mines or fracking, which means fracturing and cracking the stratum, allows gas to be released upwards, but also allows the water to flow downwards. This leaves the topsoil without water, which eventually will turn it to sand as the organic matter dies.

The nett effect is that the gas is released once, but the water escapes forever. The gas company makes its money and moves on- the yield of the land is forever damaged. The farmer is the first economic casualty, national production notices it more slowly. The chemicals used in fracking also pollute the groundwater, so bores used for stock produce undrinkable water. There is no method for removing these chemicals from the groundwater.

The advocacy group, ‘Lock the Gate’, are doing their best but are still losing the political battle and the gas companies are still expanding activities. Some of the best agricultural land is the Darling Downs in Queensland and the Liverpool Plains in NSW, which are both under threat. What is also likely to happen is that they will frack near the Great Artesian Basin, which is a huge water body under a third of Australia. It is currently unpolluted by fracking chemicals, but if it becomes polluted, which seems inevitable, there will no usable water in huge areas of arid Australia. It will be a national ecological disaster.

The words of the American entrepreneur are ringing in my ears.

Farmers betrayed by government, Shell, PetroChina “fairytales” as prime land damaged by gas fracking