Six reasons why Australia should accelerate uptake of electric vehicles

A tipping point is about to be reached in the shift to electric vehicles from the internal combustion engine. Tesla has secured unprecedented orders for its Model 3, India wants petrol cars off the road by 2030, Norway wants them gone by 2025 and the Dutch want only EVs for sale by 2025; others say that will be the only choice by then, in any case.

In Australia, however, the EV market is so small it is barely visible, apart from the growing number of $124,000-plus Tesla Model S vehicles sported by the wealthy.

Not only does Australia have few EVs, it has no emissions standards for vehicles, and few if any incentives to encourage people to drive cars that cause less pollution.

So, a consortium of utilities, electric vehicle suppliers, city councils and research groups want the Australian government to get serious about the issue. They say there are six reasons why this is a good idea.

EVs will increase fuel security:

Australia imports increasing amount of fuels for its transport needs. Imports now account for 90 per cent of our fuel needs, leaving barely three weeks of supply in case of a crisis. That is despite Australia being a signatory to the International Energy Program (IEP) Treaty, which has a requirement to hold the equivalent of 90 days of the previous year’s net imports.

Not only that, imports are expensive, as Professor Ray Wills pointed out the other day, they account for more than $2 billion a month.

EVs will reduce emissions:

There is much debate about whether EVs do in fact reduce emissions in a country so heavily reliant on coal for its electricity.

ClimateWorks says that, on average, using the National Electricity Market to charge electric cars does reduce emissions. (The exception is Victoria with its brown coal dependency, but Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia deliver significant savings).

Its study says that if the renewable energy target is met, then by 2020, those savings will be greater, and even more so if Australia pursues the “deep carbonisation” that it has signed up for at the Paris climate talks.

EVs will deliver health benefits:

A 2011 study suggested significant uptake of EVs in Victoria would reduce emissions by nearly 1.5 MtCO2e in 2030 as part of $5.5 billion in wider economic benefits for the Victorian economy.

That study also highlights the air quality benefits arising from electric vehicle adoption, delivering air pollutant reductions of almost 10,000 tonnes of NOx and 2,000 tonnes of PM10. According to EPA Victoria, these figures represent around 10 per cent of the 2006 inventories for these pollutants in the Port Phillip region.

CSIRO modelling from 2012 found that electric vehicle adoption would be concentrated in metropolitan areas of Victoria, where population densities were at their highest. When it is considered that the impact of air pollution on human health depends on where the pollution is, in relation to where people are located, electric vehicle uptake has the potential to deliver meaningful benefits to community health.

EVs will provide more job opportunities: 

And EVs will be cheaper