Claim: You can charge your electric vehicle using solar panels overnight
This quote only shows how out of touch the Australian Prime Minister is.
Out of context quote?
Albanese says electric cars can be charged overnight from solar panels.
Of course this quote has been taken out of context, in that Albanese was talking about subsiding lithium batteries for solar storage, in homes that have solar power and electric cars, so that electric cars should be able to be charged overnight in batteries that were filled up with solar power that was generated from sunlight during the day.
In the broader social context, though...
In the broader social context, though, the way the quote is being used satirically points to some undeniable facts:
Very few people can afford electric vehicles – they are quite simply out of the price range of ordinary people.
Many of those in Australia who have solar panels could only buy them because of government subsidies.
Solar is inherently unreliable, because some days there are clouds.
And lithium batteries are not only prohibitively expensive for any ordinary person, they are also dangerous, particularly near homes, for they are prone to suddenly bursting into flame.
And then there is the issue of electric vehicles being unsuitable for long journeys in Australia. Many people travel hundreds of miles in a day, and for these distances, electric vehicles are not only inefficient, they are dangerous, because you really don’t want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere – even on a highway – in the harsh environment of the Australian outback.
Electric power is much less efficient than petrol or fossil fuels.
And the fact that – let’s face it – most people will end up charging their vehicles from the grid, particularly if they are making long journeys and must rely on electric refueling depots along the way.
And in that respect, electric vehicles are less efficient than petrol cars, simply because the power loss in power transmission lines is so high – somewhere around 17% for Transmission losses and 50% for Distribution losses (Reference); while the actual power loss in transporting fuel is (surely) a lot less than that. A petrol car that carries the fuel with it, loses very little of the energy of that fuel; admittedly some would be lost through spillage during transportation in the fuel tanker to the petrol station, some would be lost through evaporation in the tank or spillage when filling the car, perhaps – but these losses will be nowhere near the losses electric vehicles suffer when energy is provided through power lines and transformers.
An electric car (that is probably powered by a power station run by fossil fuels) has already lost at least 60-70% of that power by the time the electricity gets from the power station to the electric car; going through transformers and along transmission lines.
It may be that they forgot about this fact in California, where they are now banning people from charging their cars from the power grid in the evenings, after having used every trick in the book to get them to buy electric vehicles rather than vehicles that run on far more efficient fossil fuels.