Inconvenient truths on road to our renewables revolution

The green dream turns into a nightmare during a search for a functional EV charging station.

A Tesla Model Y charges at a Sydney EV charging station. Picture: Getty Images

There are two things about my life I never thought I’d hear myself say. The first, I live in Sydney. The other? I drive a Tesla.

As for living in Sydney, I love it. I can’t believe it took me 25 years to get here but that’s a rabbit hole for another day. As for the Tesla I’d like to invite you to sit back, relax and pour yourselves a cuppa as I unfold a tale of my own hypocrisy. I have passionately rubbished the electric vehicle revolution for some considerable time.

For context, of all the cars I’ve driven in 49.9 years of life my two favourites were my CV8 Monaro and my SS ute.

So, the fact I’m quiet­ly gliding around Sydney in an EV is due to one reason alone: generous government tax breaks for business such as mine, based on overly generous industry subsidies designed to push us into these vehicles.

Someone asked me recently what model I got. I told them it’s called the tax write-off and it’s a ripper.

Yeah, I’m a hypocrite, but I’m honest about why I’m driving it. And truthfully? It’s a terrific car for around the city. It’s zippy. Quiet. At Christmas, the indicators make the sound of sleighbells and it offers a feature called “Caraoke”. This car was made for me.

But fairytales are for kids and the green dream we’re being wooed with is anything but and I’m here to tell you why.

To start, I can’t charge my car at home. I rent and my strata has said a firm no, and I’m not alone.

My initiation to the reality of living the green dream defined frustration. First, find a nearby charging point. Arrive to find it’s out of order. Repeat step one. Find one that’s working. Arrive, only to find it’s occupied. Sit in car to wait turn. Sit in car to wait for car to charge. When you run a company and time is everything, well …

Last weekend I lost 40 per cent of my battery. I’d left it a friend’s farm in the NSW Southern Highlands while we went camping in the High Country. I didn’t know I had to turn off a security feature that sucked the battery. The things you learn, eh? I was down to the red, with just 75km range.

I consulted my Tesla app and bingo! A charging point was just 1km from the farm (a so-called destination charger, installed at vineyards and hotels). I arrived to find them covered still in plastic, not yet operational. A very kind man on the property told me I was the fourth person who’d turned up that day, before cheerfully running an extension cord from the mains for a temporary lifeline.

I’m no freeloader so I dropped 100 bucks at the cellar door, only to find the charging rate added only 2km or so an hour.

Rolling the dice like a seasoned gambler, I consulted the app and found another option, 2km down the road.

The whole joint was shut. Down to 70km range and I’m breaking a sweat. Are these real kilometres, I wondered. Or special, Elon Musk kilometres? I wistfully eyed off the diesel four-wheel drives cruising with confidence down the Old Hume Highway as I sweated over my phone trying to find a power point.

Finally, success! God bless you, NRMA and the Mittagong RSL. Of course, the singular charging point was occupied. I patiently waited my turn. Then impatiently waited for the car to charge enough to get me back to Sydney, leaving just shy of four hours after I was supposed to.

I could keep going, but there’s a more important thread to discuss.

It’s not just the undercooked infrastructure. There’s a weird, cultish, underlying soft messaging that the power is free. The first time I charged the car, it was at a shopping centre carpark near me that offers free weekend parking. I didn’t pay a cent. Honestly, I have no idea who did.

I’ve come clean with my own hypocrisy, but are we as a country able to do the same? Are we OK with building our green virtue on the back of the exploitation of impoverished workers in faraway places? These unachievable, aggressive renewable targets imposed on homes and businesses, this dream of being a renewable superpower is impossible to achieve otherwise.

We tell the world how brilliantly green we are while someone else’s kids do the dirty work all day in a cobalt mine in Congo. The hypocrisy of the green dream doesn’t stop with the production of EVs. Wind farms, solar technology, all of it. Free power from the sun and the wind, proponents love to shout. Nothing on earth is free. That’s the first rule of life. It’s well-documented that wind farm turbines are impossible to recycle. They go straight to landfill. In Germany, wind farms kill an estimated 100,000 birds every year. That’s a conservative estimate.

Driving back from the Snowy Mountains looking across Lake George to the horizon beyond, it’s impossible to miss the ugly wind turbines that sit motionless, scarring the horizon and the autumn sky. In the past 12 months further proposed wind farms in northern Queensland and Tasmania have been met with vehement community opposition because of the risk posed to a range of endangered species.

This week’s federal budget threw billions at green energy projects, but nobody seems capable of an honest conversation. That must change.

We need a sound, sustainable energy mix. One that includes renewables, solar and wind but also coal and gas, and eventually nuclear too. Any other approach is dishonest. Any other approach will only end up failing.