It's curious how the transition to renewable energy is working out
in practice from what I see of it here in rural Victoria,
Australia. It's still a novelty to see an electric car, but they
are starting to appear in places that aren't obvious destinations
for tourists from Melbourne. On the other hand there seems to be a
rapid surge in construction of new petrol stations, which is a
clear bet against any widespread change to electric vehicles in at
least however long it takes to recoup those construction costs. I
can think of three new petrol stations built in country towns over
the last twelve months, and those are all but a couple of the
country towns that I see regularly enough to keep track (the other
towns are too small for a petrol station these days anyway).
They're often big petrol stations too, betting on visits from lots
of cars and trucks, presumably for at least the rest of the decade.
None of the new stations sell LPG though, even where they're
replacing an old one which did. That's odd really, because with
petrol prices having rocketed up again you'd think LPG conversions
would be more popular than ever. Although more recently gas prices
have gone up a lot too apparantly, and the difference was always
about tax rather than anything practical anyway.
Speaking of gas, it was rather shocking to hear a few weeks ago
that the Victorian government has banned installing new gas
appliances in homes, starting next year. Apparantly this is their
answer to getting people onboard with renewable energy, at least
after we stop generating most of it from coal or gas power plants
(particularly in evenings when people would use gas most for
cooking and heating). The credibility of their commitment to the
energy transistion is still hampered by the recent introduction of
taxes on electric vehicle drivers to make up for lost revenue from
highly-taxed fuel sales (except for LPG, to which somehow they
never applied the same logic). Australia is still a major gas
exporter too, shipping it overseas where other countries buy it
much cheaper than what they charge us here domestically (sort of an
inverted Saudi Arabia model - what a fair distribution of wealth we
have in this healthy democracy of ours!).
Anyway I recently took a walk through a new housing estate that's
been very slowly going up in the face of all the building
industry's recent supply and finance disasters. Facinatingly, all
those new houses seemed to have gas meters, and all the hot water
services that I saw were gas ones. I don't know about the economics
of it all (my place is all-electric anyway - the model of modern
1970s living that it is), but this forced switch away from gas
looks like a real about-face for the industry. I find that
interesting.
That new housing estate actually joins onto an old one from around
the 1940s which was built of identically-designed houses for the
workers of a nearby coal mine. The mine closed years ago and the
houses were then used by the government for public housing, but now
most or all of them seem to have been sold off (cue other news
articles about massive public housing shortages). It used to be
known as 'chinatown', in a probably-racist reference to the
disarray resulting from public housing tennants stuck in a small
country town without much industry. It still has a distinctively
different feel compared to the new estate bolted onto its formerly
dead-end roads. It's less dead, really, at least in the middle of a
weekday.
I went to visit what's left of the abandoned coal mine Saturday
before last. As an extension of my dam tours because it was
open-cut and apparantly flooded once they turned off the pumps that
kept it dry. It's now on the boundary of a state park and the map
seemed to show a forest track running alongside it, as well as a
road running right up to it. The gravel road that the mine road
turns off from had been built up so much along the top of the hill
that the turn-off was barely even visible amongst all the gumtrees,
and what's left of the road was gated off anyway. I found a place
to park the Jag while narrowly avoiding getting it bogged, and left
it looking strikingly elegant in contrast to the rough terrain, as
it so often does on my adventures. Then I spent an hour or so
walking deep down some seemingly endless bush tracks until I
eventually conceeded that all paths leading to the mine were gated
off or adorned with large "NO TRESPASSING: Private Property" signs.
So that chapter in local energy history remains off limits for me.
But it was a nice stroll through the bush, and I gave the
kookaburras something to laugh about.
I'm still reading about the history of fusion reactor research, so
sooner or later I'll probably post about all the wonders of energy
technology due in the next 30 years (counting those years from
1950, of course).
