Kudos for ACT plus a question
July 29th, 2009 at 10:09 am by David FarrarHeather Roy publishes a list of all bills up for a vote this week, a summary of the bill, its pros and cons, and how ACT will vote on it.
This is great transparency and I would encourage all parties to do this.
I do have one question though. Heather describes the Road User Amendment Bill as:
This Bill will exempt light electric motor vehicles from road user chargers. The hope is that an exemption will encourage the uptake of such vehicles to slowly improve the efficiency of the motor vehicle fleet, decrease reliance on fossil fuels, improve energy security, and reduce vehicle emissions to improve air quality and greenhouse gas levels. If we accept that electric cars provide a net environmental “good”, this is a commonsense (and relatively low-cost) measure to increase uptake. The other positive aspect is that the Bill will provide for 42 days notice of an increase in road user charges.
I was amused to then see ACT is voting against the bill, after describing it so positively.
So are some “cons” missing from the summary, or has ACT described how it will vote incorrectly?
UPDATE: ACT are voting for it. It was a typo
July 29th, 2009 at 10:48 am
I can imagine areas of ACT deciding that road user charges are a cost-based measure that seek to charge people for their use of roads. Electric vehicles still use roads, so they should still pay user charges. If we want to subsidise electric vehicles, it would make much more sense to directly subsidise them – agree to pay $10,000 towards the purchase price of each one, or some such.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 11:03 am
I think it would make much more sense to subsidise the purchase price of an electric vehicle. After all, that is the primary barrier to greater uptake of these vehicles – not their running costs.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
My understanding is that electric cars are a substantial net cost to the environment rather than saving due to their production and fuel impacts.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Exempting these cars from RUC would be yet another “Peter Dunne” tweak of the tax system – adding more compliance costs and complications for no useful outcome. Policy upon policy like that is why the Tax Act and in fact regulation and legislation expands to fill more bookshelves.
Imagine what a more productive economy and stronger exchange rate could achieve – lower cost electric cars, and many other inputs. Let’s focus on getting the economy working properly rather than fiddling with the Titanic’s dashboard.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
act website updated, Act to support the bill
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
All of that quote bar about 1.25 sentences comes directly out of the explanatory note preceding the bill.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Alan Wilkinson 12:00 pm,
“My understanding is that electric cars are a substantial net cost to the environment rather than saving due to their production and fuel impacts.”
I agree Alan. The thing most people don’t realise is that to run electric cars requires ‘electricity’. This may sound obvious, and of course it is, but this is the ‘problem’; you have to generate that electricity to power these cars in addition to existing demands on the national grid.
With our existing infrastructure already struggling, especially in winter, as evidenced in recent years, the issue is where will this extra electricity come from?
Imagine in our future green utopia, where we all have either electric or hybrid cars. Everyone gets home after a ‘day at the office’, plugs their car into the grid to charge up overnight, and flicks the switch. We all know that at ~6pm when people start to cook their evening meal that there is a substantial power drain for an hour or so on the grid. Now imagine adding to that approximately a million cars [my guess] being charged overnight. Can you? I tell you folks, it ain’t gonna happen. Without doing the sums I would guess that we would need to upsize the existing power generation capacity by three to four hundred percent. Once again I add, ‘it ain’t gonna happen.
This is something that is generally ignored by those pushing the electrification of private transport. If all the facts were laid on the table most people would understand that this is not the ‘silver bullet’ to our so called ‘dependence on fossil fuels’. In fact, I believe, we would introduce more problems than we would solve.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
The hippies want everyone to have an electric car but they don’t want to build any power generation capacity for the massive extra load of everyone recharging their cars
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Surely in the future we’ll have smarter power meters that ensure peoples’ cars get charged up during low demand periods? I mean we have a LOT of spare power generating capacity at 2am in the morning, why not be smart enough to charge up the cars then?
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
jarbury, just because we have spare delivery capacity at 2 am doesn’t mean we have spare generating capacity. That is limited by the amount of water in our dams irrespective of what time of day it is drawn off.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Build either more dams or some nuclear power plants. Simple really. Main issue is getting resource consents for either of those things – but those pushing electric cars presumably have a plan for dealing with that.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Tidal power?
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Tidal power isn’t economic. The devices are quite expensive and require a lot of maintenance. Since they’re underwater that maintenance is expensive.
Offshore windmills have a lot of potential.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
PaulL 1:47 pm,
“Build either more dams or some nuclear power plants. Simple really. Main issue is getting resource consents for either of those things – but those pushing electric cars presumably have a plan for dealing with that.”
Gee, it does sound simple when you put it like that Paul. Well actually it doesn’t. Do you have a sense of the scale we’re talking about here? We’re not talking about just increasing generation capacity by 5 or 10%, but more likely 300 to 400% [and that may be conservative].
And no amount of utilising “low demand periods”, as Jarbury mentioned, is going to meet the energy generation requirements.
And another thing Paul, those “pushing electric cars” DON’T “have a plan for dealing with that”. This is the elephant in the room that many choose not to see. The only real solution is nuclear power generation [most others methods are just not cost effective, apart from hydro and thermal], but this is likely to be even less popular in NZ than the current utilisation of fossil fuels. And can you imagine how popular increasing the number of hydro dams by say 400% is likely to be? About as popular as going nuclear IMHO.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Kris, I’d go nuclear in a flash. It’s not all that much power we’re talking about, the latest generation nuclear plants are very safe and quite efficient. Their main need is a source of uranium (Aus is pretty close) and lots of cooling water (which is something we have quite a lot of). They’re more efficient when built close to demand, but they can be built further away if that makes people happy – we can build them all in Otago if that is what it took to get them approved.
Unfortunately, as you correctly note, the hippies that complain about warming are the same people who refuse to allow any of the solutions that are actually viable to deal with it. If the greens hadn’t gotten up in arms about nuclear power in the 70s, most of the western world would be a lot like France today, where 60% of more of their electricity comes from nuclear. Having engineered the situation we’re in, they’re now crying about how the evil capitalists caused global warming. They need to take a hard look in the mirror – the greenies caused global warming when they shut down the only cost effective and scalable source of power that doesn’t emit carbon and is available to those who don’t have, or won’t use, natural resources like hydro.
PS: I’m always waiting for someone to use the acronym IMDO. For some reason nobody does. Is the H therefore superfluous?
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Sadly, I doubt our hopeless building industry could build a nuclear reactor building that didn’t leak.
Vote:July 29th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
PaulL 5:23 pm,
“… the greenies caused global warming when they shut down the only cost effective and scalable source of power that doesn’t emit carbon and is available to those who don’t have, or won’t use, natural resources like hydro.”
Absolutely, a bitter pill that they won’t either admit to or swallow.
IMDO:
Vote:Israel Missile Defense Organization?
or
Intelligence Materiel Development Office?
Is there another? or am I just a bit slow?
July 30th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Well, just seems that if there’s an “in my honest opinion”, presumably somewhere someone is posting “in my dishonest opinion”. Otherwise we wouldn’t need the qualifier, and could just stick to “in my opinion”.
Vote:July 30th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Paul,
I had always thought the H stood for Humble, and hence my confusion regarding the Honest vs Dishonest. But it does seem that some do use the Honest for H in IMHO – would I be right in my thinking that these would be in the minority?
Having found the Israel Missile Defense Organization option, maybe if I employ IMDO in the future this can be my private little joke to give my comment more ‘Punch’. I have always thought that Irael ‘punched’ well above its weight.
Vote:July 30th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Ah. Humble. Forgot about that one – yes, that is probably the common usage. I withdraw my allegation that the H is superfluous.
If I just use IMO, does that mean I’m not humble? Just saying.
Vote: