by Jorlcrin » 20 Feb 2024, 9:09 am
My take; From an Outback Rural/Agricultural property perspective:-
I cannot see the diesel ute being able to be phased out; much as I expect the environmental crew will try to.
I would very much love to migrate to EV on my small vehicle fleet( at this point - 3 motorbikes, an ATV, and about 10 small Honda engines driving pumps etc).
I see a significant amount of fuel used each year; checking waters, mustering, running pumps, etc etc, which I think could be all done using EV systems.
But there isnt anything off-the-shelf on the market, that would allow me to easily set up an off-grid solar bank and charging station.
Key to that would be a cassette-style battery pack; one which can be swapped out in a matter of minutes.
And a bank of spare cassettes charged up in my charging station, and ready to use.
For small engines, you'd win half the rural people over, if we had a standardized Battery-Pack system that was inter-changeable, and we could purchase scalar solar-powered charging stations.
I can drive up to any diesel bowser, put fuel into my car, and be gone inside 10 minutes.
Cant do the same with EV's or small motors at this point.
Which made me think of the fire season we are just slowly coming out of(in this area at least)..
We often deploy a grader, and sometimes a water truck, to big fires.
We are never likely to convert/migrate our heavy equipment to EV, so diesel will be with us for the foreseeable future.
But, the utility vehicles like the Landcruiser ute and the Hilux, their roles could possibly be addressed by EV's in the future....
...Until I come to the nights where we returned home from fighting a bushfire, spent 20 minutes refueling the grader and the Landcruiser, topped up the petrol in the Firefighter pump, and checked the drip-torch fuel.
After 20 minutes and a quick feed, we are ready to roll out to the next fire, if one starts.
And in bad fire seasons, attending 2 or 3 fires a night isnt uncommon in this country.
So, if it was a bad night of fires, we could easily have 2 or 3 vehicles deployed, and when we return home in our shiney EV utes, we would need to then re-charge the EV's in sequence, because NO-ONE is going to have the charging capability to have fast-charge for multiple vehicles on a rural property.
Very unlikely most rural properties will have a (Grid connected) fast-Charge station at all, so next-quickest charge time is 3-5 hours?
How long will it take to be ready to re-deploy to the next fire if we have EV firefighting vehicles?
My guess is over 24 hours,
And next tranche of Sparkleys will be rolling in about 6 hours before we have everything fully charged.
I LIKE the idea of making my own power/fuel, but it just isnt mature enough yet.
And nothing I'm seeing in development is even close to what would convince me to consider migration to EV.
Which suggests the current fleet of elderly 4WD's and small ICE motors etc we have here, are going to be with us for a very long time into the future.
My 2 cents.