Posts Tagged → policy

Check your mirrors: 3 things rooftop solar can teach us about Australia’s electric car rollout

“The electric vehicle transition is about more than just doing away with vehicles powered by fossil fuels. We must also ensure quality technology and infrastructure, anticipate the future and avoid unwanted outcomes, such as entrenching disadvantage.

Australia’s world-leading rollout of rooftop solar power systems offers a guide to help navigate the transition. We’ve identified three key lessons on what’s gone well, and in hindsight, what could have been done differently.”

Full piece in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/check-your-mirrors-3-things-rooftop-solar-can-teach-us-about-australias-electric-car-rollout-162085

Microgrids: how to keep the power on when disaster hits

It’s timely to consider how we can build a better system – one that’s more resilient in times of disaster and also doesn’t contribute, through carbon emissions, to making disasters more frequent.

One part of the solution is more connectedness, so one transmission line being severed is not the crisis it is now.

But just as important is ensuring connectedness isn’t crucial.

This means moving away from centralised systems – powered by a few big generators – to decentralised ones, with many local and small-scale generators. Instead of one big grid, we need many microgrids, interconnected but able to operate independently when necessary.

Full Piece in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/microgrids-how-to-keep-the-power-on-when-disaster-hits-130534

Get in on the ground floor: how apartments can join the solar boom

While there are now more solar panels in Australia than people, the many Australians who live in apartments have largely been locked out of this solar revolution by a minefield of red tape and potentially uninformed strata committees.

In the face of these challenges, Stucco, a small co-operative housing block in Sydney, embarked on a mission to take back the power. Hopefully their experiences can serve as a guide to how other apartment-dwellers can more readily go solar.

Full piece in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/get-in-on-the-ground-floor-how-apartments-can-join-the-solar-boom-79172

ABC piece on EV policy

Excerpt from ABC TV interview on Australian EV policy has been featured in an online story here.

“The fact that Australia has a small number of people in a global market — that hasn’t stopped us from being world-leading in adopting solar.

“We’re one of the world leaders in adopting home batteries — there’s no reason why we can’t get the latest and greatest in electric vehicles as well.”