ENERGY ENIGMAS

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).

 - The Free Thinker