Feed aggregator

Just think of it as a battery that can also take you to the shops. Steve Jurvetson/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

A key question amid the consternation over the current state of Australia’s east coast energy market has been how much renewable energy capacity to build, and how fast.

But help could be at hand from a surprising source: electric vehicles. By electrifying our motoring, we would boost demand for renewable energy from the grid, while smoothing out some of the destabilising effects that the recent boom in household solar has had on our energy networks.

Australia’s electricity infrastructure was built largely without renewable energy in mind, and primarily to maintain reliability for when demand peaks. The high uptake of solar panels, while good for reducing carbon emissions, has reduced grid demand by 5-10% in Australia, and as a side-effect has lowered the value of network assets, raised power prices, and made the grid trickier to manage.

Electric vehicles can ease the pressure on spikes in electricity prices by adding storage capacity. They are effectively a distributed storage system - with smart meters they can feed electricity back into the grid when prices are high. These vehicles’ battery reserves can thus help with the balancing of the grid and provide energy in the peak period. Electric vehicles would also add battery storage to the grid at the same time, which can reduce the need to size the grid for demand peaks.

One way to think of electric vehicles is essentially as batteries you can drive. So before the government pursues plans such as spending A$2 billion on expanding the Snowy Hydro scheme, it should do a cost-benefit analysis comparing the returns from similar infrastructure investment in electric vehicles.

According to the Office of the Chief Economist, Australia produced 6 billion kilowatt hours of solar PV in 2015 – enough to run almost 2 million cars, equivalent to 10% of Australia’s total current passenger vehicle fleet. Increasing demand for grid-sourced electricity will put downward pressure on network prices, which typically are roughly half of the cost of a household energy tariff. At a time when demand has declined and policy settings have created lots of investor uncertainty, the increased demand will also encourage investment in new generation capacity.

Electric vehicles can also increase economic activity in Australia and improve air quality and health. Australia has nearly 20 million cars that together drive 280 billion km each year. Passenger vehicles alone consume 20 billion litres of fuel each year in Australia. At A$1.50 per litre, that is A$30 billion per year that is burned, with roughly half the revenues going to multinational oil companies and the other half going into federal coffers as fuel tax.

The health costs of pollution from vehicle emissions adds a further A$1,450 per household per year in major cities, an annual impost of some A$14.5 billion on household and government budgets – roughly the same as what the government earns in fuel tax.

If all vehicles were electric, the same distance could be driven with electricity costing less than A$15 billion, because electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines (although this is slightly offset by minor grid losses). This would thus deliver a double saving, in terms of both household fuel bills and reduced health costs.

Changing gear

Of course this won’t happen overnight, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The electricity grid will need time to adjust and add extra renewable capacity, as the cost of electric cars comes down and coal power stations get old.

Both economic analysis and recent political experience suggest that encouraging investment in renewable energy is expensive, especially if the only driving factor is the need to cut greenhouse emissions (important though that is).

Here is where electric vehicles can really help the grid. Swapping petrol or diesel cars for electric ones on a large enough scale will increase Australia’s flatlining electricity demand, making it more lucrative for energy suppliers to invest in new generation capacity. Given the increasing cost of gas, and the declining support for coal, on balance most of this demand will be met with new renewable capacity, facilitated by the addition of all these new “batteries you can drive”.

A suggested pathway to energy sustainability via electric cars. Adapted from Andrich et al. Inequality as an obstacle to sustainable energy use, Energy for Sustainable Development

Government policy should be to set some high-level national interest objectives, such as maintaining gas for domestic use, and then simply not interfere with the market as much as possible. But political leaders are struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in technology and the market. The pathway to sustainability would have been smoother and faster if governments had looked to WA for a gas reservation policy, not intervened by closing coal, and reduced the subsidies that allowed solar power to grow so disruptively fast (particularly in wealthier households).

Making more effort to promote electric cars would also have allowed a more successful transition to renewable energy and reduced the price shocks being suffered by eastern Australia in areas such as the gas market. Fortunately, it is not too late.

Hitting the road

Investing in a new car is not a decision most households take lightly. This is especially true of electric cars, which are expensive, are not marketed widely, are available in only a limited range of models, and are subject to concerns about charging and range.

Presently, electric vehicles are only affordable for higher-income households, which is ironic given the benefits they would offer lower-income households in terms of fuel budgeting and reduced exposure to urban pollution and health costs.

One-third of an electric vehicle’s cost is batteries, which are rapidly coming down in price. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that by 2022, electric models will cost the same as their petrol counterparts. That will be the point of liftoff for sales.

Meanwhile, electric cars have an undoubted cool factor. Buying one is a powerful way to show you care about your community’s future. Pardon the pun, but just look at the way Tesla founder Elon Musk electrified the debate over South Australia’s electricity problems.

For governments, electric vehicles offer an opportunity to make significant inroads on environmental and health problems, not to mention urban planning and infrastructure. The demand for car batteries could also boost related industries, such as lithium mining, in which Australia is a world leader.

Feeling electric

Simple, inexpensive policies could encourage electric vehicle uptake, such as reducing registration fees and stamp duty on electric cars and allowing them to drive in bus or other priority lanes, while also hiking the tax on diesel cars that cause cancer.

Other emerging transport trends, such as car-sharing clubs and ride-sharing apps, could also hasten the uptake of electric vehicles. Sharing increases the number of kilometres driven by each individual vehicle, meaning that the upfront costs are paid back more rapidly, leaving the owner with a car that is paid off and cheaper to run than a petrol or diesel model.

These facts are not lost on the car manufacturers themselves. But given the potential co-benefits to the electricity grid and community health, we might expect power utilities and health agencies to join the push to actively promote electric vehicles – not to mention politicians who are looking to deal with our energy issues and win a few votes along they way.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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Anent the admirable Stephen Moss’s remark (Birdwatch, 20 March) that his snow bunting on the Somerset coast was “probably the furthest south they ever get”, I have been spotting snow buntings all across the Alps for more than 40 years. In winter they are common, often seen in flocks around picnic spots, in all the high ski resorts.

My last sighting was in January. While photographing Alpine choughs on the summit of the Marmolada, the Queen of the Dolomites at just under 11,000ft, joining the choughs was a pair of snow buntings. Back at our hotel, a small flock of fieldfares, also breeders in Arctic latitudes, were feeding on berries. I suspect that both species were drifting northwards from even further south.
Jim Freeman
Croftamie, Loch Lomondside

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The Stop Adani Alliance will lobby against the coalmine in northern Queensland, citing new polling that shows three-quarters of Australians oppose subsidies for the mine when told the government plans to loan its owners $1bn.

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Every so often, a vibrant green colour infuses the waters of Lake Maracaibo. Floating vegetation – likely duckweed – was swirling in the Venezuelan lake when Nasa’s Aqua satellite flew over in February 2017. Most of the time, Maracaibo’s waters are stratified into layers, with nutrient-rich, cooler, saltier water at the bottom, and a warmer, fresher layer near the surface. But after heavy rains, the layers can mix and make the lake an ideal habitat for plant growth. A narrow strait roughly 6km (4 miles) wide and 40 km (25 miles) long connects the lake to the Gulf of Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea. The influx of saltwater through the strait makes Maracaibo an estuarine lake. This mixing causes the water currents responsible for the concentric swirl pattern, according to Lawrence Kiage, a professor of geoscience at Georgia State University.

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Claxton, Norfolk Lapwing song was the omnipresent soundtrack of all my childhood springs. Now it has gone from behind our family home

Part of the charm of lapwings is that they look silly, a friend says, and I can surmise what she means. It’s the ridiculous crest, the unnecessary breadth of wing, which gives them so much more aerial lift and loop than they require, and then there’s the zaniness of their spring display. Nor should we leave out the high-pitched notes that pass for song and which remind me of a dog’s squeaky play bone wheezing in and out of tune as the animal chews.

Yet lapwings are too ingrained in a lifetime of memory for me to think them only silly. They are the first sounds I awakened to as a naturalist in Derbyshire, whose nests we came upon in the grass like a revelation, and whose blotched-brown Easter eggs seemed a kind of miracle.

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Soils play an important role in the nutritional value of our food.

The next time you bite into an apple, spare a thought for the soils that helped to produce it. Soils play a vital role, not just in an apple’s growth, but in our own health too.

The formation of soil, pedogenesis, is a very slow process. Creating one millimetre of soil coverage can take anything from a few years to an entire millennium.

But with soils around the world under threat, we’re in danger of losing their health benefits faster than they are replaced.

Healthy soils for healthy plants

A healthy soil is a living ecosystem in which dead organic matter forms the base of a food web consisting of microscopic and larger organisms.

Together, these organisms sustain other biological activities, including plant, animal and human health. Soils supply nutrients and water, which are vital for plants, and are home to organisms that interact with plants, for better or worse.

In the natural environment, plants form relationships with soil microbes to obtain water, nutrients and protection against some pathogens. In return, the plants provide food.

The use of mineral fertilisers can make some of these relationships redundant, and their breakdown can lead to the loss of other benefits such as micronutrients and disease protection.

Certain farming practices, such as tillage (or mechanical digging), are harmful to fungi in soils. These fungi play important roles in helping plants obtain crucial nutrients such as zinc.

Zinc is an essential micronutrient for all living organisms. Zinc deficiency affects an estimated one-third of the world’s population, particularly in regions with zinc-deficient soils. If food staples such as cereal grains are grown on zinc-deficient soils and further lack their fungi helpers, they become deficient in zinc.

If the way food is grown affects the composition and health of plants, could farming practices that focus on soil health make food more nutritious? A recent review on fruits says yes.

The researchers found that fruits produced under organic farming generally contained more vitamins, more flavour compounds such as phenolics, and more antioxidants when compared with conventional farming. Many factors are at play here, but pest and soil management strategies that benefit soil organisms and their relationship with plants are part of the equation.

The composition and function of animals and humans reflects, to some extent, what they eat. For example, the fish you eat is only rich in omega-3 fatty acids if the fish has eaten algae and microbes that manufacture these oils. The fish itself does not produce these compounds.

Increasing numbers of studies are demonstrating the link between nutrition and human health issues. We know, for example, that antioxidants, carbohydrates, saturated fat content and the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids contribute to immune system regulation.

We do not produce some of these nutrients; we must obtain them through our food. Therefore, how food is grown is a matter of public health.

Beyond nutrition

Soil is the greatest reservoir of biodiversity. A handful of soil can contain millions of individuals from thousands of species of bacteria and fungi, not to mention the isopods, rotifers, nematodes, worms and many other identified and yet-to-be-identified organisms that call soil home.

Soil microbes produce an arsenal of compounds in their chemical warfare for dominance and survival. Many widely used antibiotics and other drugs were isolated from soil. It may hold the answers to our battle with antibiotic resistance and other diseases including cancer.

It has also been suggested that exposure to diverse microbes in the natural environment can help prevent allergies and other immune-related disorders.

The road to healthy soils

Unfortunately, we are doing a poor job of looking after our soils. About two-thirds of agricultural land in Australia is suffering from acidification, contamination, depletion of nutrients and organic matter, and/or salinisation. And in case anyone forgets, soil is every bit as non-renewable as oil because soil formation is such a slow process.

On the other hand, soil erosion can happen very quickly. For a taste of what happens when soils are destroyed, nothing beats sitting through a dust storm and watching day turn into night. Dust storms inspired George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road.

In the 2009 Red Dawn in Sydney, some 2.5 million tonnes of soil were lost within hours to the ocean in a 3,000km-long, 2.5km-high dust plume.

Australia’s major cities began on fertile land. Melbourne’s food bowl can supply 41% of the city’s fresh food needs. Such secure access to fresh and whole food needs our protection.

Healthy soils are part of the solution to some of our dilemmas – poverty, malnutrition and climate change – as they underpin processes that gives us food, energy and water. If we want to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, soil health is a linchpin we cannot ignore.

From this perspective, agricultural practices to maintain healthy soil are clearly an important target for policymakers. Looking after our soils ultimately means looking after ourselves.

Ee Ling Ng works at the Australian-China Joint Research Centre: Healthy Soils for Sustainable Food Production and Environmental Quality. She receives funding from the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science.

Deli Chen receives funding from Australia Research Council, Meat Livestock Australia, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.

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