DEAR News Of The Area,

The letter on 25 January 2024, ‘Discussion getting lost on power generation’, could equally be headed ‘Never miss an opportunity to plug the totally unjustifiable and uneconomic nuclear’.

Two details that upset the letter’s argument:

Liddell’s closure is a loss of an unreliable 800 to 1.25 GW, not 2GW (Ref: Climate Council).

Refined nuclear is currently a scarce resource: US had to qualify its import ban on Russian nuclear fuel due to world demand following the Ukraine invasion (Ref: Reuters report 23 Dec 2024).

Also, the Russian war highlights the potential threat nuclear power stations can become.

Further as our energy minister is correct to point out, nuclear is a very expensive energy source (Ref: DCCEEW 23 Dec 2023).

The addition to the grid, and much of the proposed wind power and centralised PV, is indeed redundant and I would refer you to the ARENA, V2X.au Summary Report – Opportunities and Challenges for Bidirectional Charging in Australia 30 June 2023.

Figure 14 and the accompanying text highlights this point.

“The challenge for Australia is establishing an effective framework to access the capacity that will already exist in our EV fleet.

“The marginal cost of this is relatively low.

“Based on an incremental cost of purchasing an DC-AC EVSE, we can expect capital costs in the order of $25,000/MWh, or six percent of current large-scale battery costs (~$400,000/MWh)4 5 on a simple per MWh basis.

“The basis of this advantage is that the cost of enabling V2G is only a marginal increase in the cost of installing a V2G-capable EVSE.

“The battery comes with the car.

“Despite the size of the prize, no Australian jurisdiction has policies or programs designed to promote V2G capability in our vehicle fleet, or consumer uptake.

“This is understandable given the nascent state of vehicle and equipment supply chains however the headline from our analysis is that this will change quickly over the next two years, and it is time for Australian governments and regulators to get their skates on, and prepare the policy and regulatory frameworks, and industry support infrastructure, that will enable the benefits of V2G to be realised.”

Australia is well endowed with solar irradiation compared with northern hemisphere regions from which much of the science originates thus making distributed PV (household, parking lot, industry) BEVs with bidirectional charging, and distributed batteries our best solution.

Accelerate BEVs, PVs and require relatively minor grid modifications and save us from the proposed redundant expenditure and solve transport and energy emissions.

Regards,
Rod FLETCHER,
Corlette.