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Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

bloomberg.com

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Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#91

Post by IIAOPSW »

andrewstuart wrote: post #54

Yeah but Australia also happily digging vast quantities of coal out of the ground and selling it to India and China and elsewhere, utterly dwarfing any local cutbacks in usage. A land of opportunity (for the OzzieGarchs) and hypocrisy (for the politicians).

So. You can't solve everything at once, and you can't solve anything by being the noble idiot in the iterated prisoners dilemma. India and China will figure out a sustainable replacement in their own time. They have a much larger population inertia and thus it takes more time to phase out and replace things. At the same time, Australia will eventually phase out and replace those mining jobs.

Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#92

Post by chucky123 »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #88
rippercushions wrote: post #32

Australia also has a remarkable tax incentive that lets you buy EVs basically tax free (fringe benefits tax exemption for novated leases, in bureaucratese). Basically, instead of paying $70k for a Tesla post-tax, you can get it deducted directly from your paycheck for around $45k pretax. The exact math depends on your income, and perversely enough the subsidy increases the more you earn and the higher your taxes, but…

Have you got any info on this? Last I heard EVs were getting made even more expensive due to the luxury car tax. (Which, yes you get a partial discount on for EVs, but even still, a reduced additional tax is still an additional tax)

A tesla base model is 60k, which is just below the luxury tax. If you purchase this car, you'll get all the ev tax benefits without the luxury tax downsides.

Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#93

Post by ch4s3 »

BryantD wrote: post #51
rainsford wrote: post #5

The graph partway down is pretty interesting. In terms of grid battery capacity that's in the works, Australia is second only to China (albeit a fairly distant second). They're even beating the US in 3rd place, which also highlights how much we're slacking in this space. If Australia is successful here, I wonder if it will spur more investment in places like the US. China is probably not a good bellwether since they…

Not in the US: the coal lobby has managed to get their product intertwined with culture wars and Manchin will reliably defect from the Democratic Party on related votes.

We’re still set to sunset a third of coal power plants in the next 6 years. The economics just don’t work anymore.

Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#94

Post by jpgvm »

irjustin wrote: post #84
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, its because in a higher tax braket you pay more tax its the sane in britain - if you earn $200,000 income-tax-free means 50% off, but if you earn $20,000. it means like 5% off Also in Uk id you want to buy a e car, you get a grant of a few grand, if you want an e motorbike you get like $300, and if you want an ebike, the most wco friwndly option, you fuck right off

Should it be a refund (instead of a tax break)? I'm leaning towards the refund since it effectively gives everyone the "same final price"

Probably, but this is Australia we are talking about. It's a literal boomer welfare state.

Ok maybe a little bit of hyperbole but not that far off the mark, fiscal policy in Australia is dominated by preferential treatment for the boomer generations finances.

Ideally we would provide incentives in the form of a refund for all vehicles below a net carbon value per km (so including plugin hybrids, etc) that are priced below a given value, say $40k AUD or something, whatever is actually affordable mid-range car (not sure about specific numbers).

The idea is that hybrids are probably going to be at a disadvantage unless they are insanely efficient, BEVs will need to bring prices down to qualify for the incentive and generally speaking we end up with drastically more efficient -and- cheaper cars as a result.

However it's also not a great look if all the boomers are buying 911s instead of Model S/X etc so may as well drop the luxury car tax for full BEV vehicles so gas guzzlers are at a disadvantage across the spectrum.

Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#95

Post by CydeWeys »

Merad wrote: post #74
cogman10 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EMP weapons are a scifi myth. It takes a lot of energy to generate an EMP that would do any damage (think, nuclear bomb levels of energy). And even then, the area of effect would be less than a mile or two radius. If someone wanted to attack a grid, well placed C4 would be cheaper and more practical (See moore county substation attack).

High altitude nuclear detonations cause powerful EMP effects over a large area. The US famously discovered this by accident in the 60s with the Starfish Prime nuclear tests, which caused EMP damage in Hawaii almost 1000 miles from the detonation.

Yes, and if nukes are being used like this then the world is ending anyway, as the en masse retaliatory nukes aren't going to be set for upper atmospheric detonation only.

Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#96

Post by femto »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #86
its-summertime wrote: post #15

https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/ is the one-stop-shop for current energy situation in Australia. Anecdotal: SA was pushing towards clean energy notably before the battery came in, but in turn, had a very unstable grid, and the things like energy trading et al. were tied up in international ownership iirc (needing authorization to do a large energy trade required someone from France giving approval, timezones didn't…

Really great visualization. Seems to disprove the title of the article to me though. Battery has a .1% grid contribution (point 1 percent, not one percent). Coal is a massive 62% of power generation in Australia! Seems improbable to me that the major driver of reducing 60+% electricity contribution is something producing .1%. Seems more like Australia is "quitting coal in records" purely because it's using so much of…

The battery is absorbing or providing short bursts of energy, thus providing grid stability, rather than than providing significant net energy. This then allows the use of renewables which might have short term variations int their output.

The big energy producer is the huge number of rooftop solar installations which everyday Australians have been putting on the roofs of their houses and wind. There are periods in summer when South Australia has surpassed 100% solar generation [1], the excess being exported to the East. These periods will continue to become more frequent, until they merge and South Australia is 100% renewable. They are the leaders, but the rest of the country is following.

By happy coincidence the most southern state and least sunny, Tasmania, is already 100% renewable due to abundant hydro, but they also have lots of wind being near the Southern Ocean.

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...

Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#97

Post by manquer »

GenerWork wrote: post #76
rippercushions wrote: post #32

Australia also has a remarkable tax incentive that lets you buy EVs basically tax free (fringe benefits tax exemption for novated leases, in bureaucratese). Basically, instead of paying $70k for a Tesla post-tax, you can get it deducted directly from your paycheck for around $45k pretax. The exact math depends on your income, and perversely enough the subsidy increases the more you earn and the higher your taxes, but…

> the subsidy increases the more you earn and the higher your taxes What's the name of this law called that does this? Seems like quite the oversight.

That is true for a lot of government schemes that work with credits , you need to have taxable income to benefit from tax credits , so higher income means more benefits up to a point

Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#98

Post by manquer »

cogman10 wrote: post #30
uejfiweun wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a dumb question, but would mass-batterification leave our society extremely vulnerable to EMP?

EMP weapons are a scifi myth. It takes a lot of energy to generate an EMP that would do any damage (think, nuclear bomb levels of energy). And even then, the area of effect would be less than a mile or two radius. If someone wanted to attack a grid, well placed C4 would be cheaper and more practical (See moore county substation attack).

EMP does not have to man made to be a problem .

Solar flares and CMEs are the real concern for system wide damage that can set us back by years if not decades .

The last couple of years showed how fragile our supply chains are ,

A large scale event can damage critical equipment like transformers that take years to manufacture, merely restarting a stopped grid is extremely complex let alone a broken one

Re: Australia is quitting coal in record time thanks to Tesla

#100

Post by GeekyBear »

GenerWork wrote: post #76
rippercushions wrote: post #32

Australia also has a remarkable tax incentive that lets you buy EVs basically tax free (fringe benefits tax exemption for novated leases, in bureaucratese). Basically, instead of paying $70k for a Tesla post-tax, you can get it deducted directly from your paycheck for around $45k pretax. The exact math depends on your income, and perversely enough the subsidy increases the more you earn and the higher your taxes, but…

> the subsidy increases the more you earn and the higher your taxes What's the name of this law called that does this? Seems like quite the oversight.

> What's the name of this law

It's a consequence of progressive tax rates.

Last year in the United States, for example, no matter how large your salary was, a single person's income tax rate for the first $10,000 of salary you earned was 10%.

The portion of your salary above that $10,000 is taxed at a higher rate, and as you cross salary amount thresholds (called tax brackets) the tax rate keeps getting increasing for the amount above that threshold.

By the time you get up above the $540,000, the portion of your salary above that $540,000 is taxed at the maximum 37% rate.

So if you purchase a big ticket item that is deducted from your salary before they figure out how much taxes you owe, high earners can save quite a bit.

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