The tide is turning quite rapidly in Australia. New government held an “EV Summit” a few weeks ago outlining their hopes and will release a policy discussion paper late September. We will get to 5% of new car sales as EVs faster than any other OECD country has - just a shame we will be last to do so, haha.
I’m not convinced EVs as grid response or virtual powerplants will be as important as people think. No EVs on sale right now can do it except the Nissan LEAF and the hardware required (a rectifier) is not cheap (approx A$10k). I’m also sceptical car owners will get much value out of it. Is it worth the hassle just for a few bucks on your electricity bill every month?
Fleets however represent much more of an opportunity. Buses, heavy vehicles (garbage trucks, delivery trucks, etc) and general fleet cars that are idle at night in a depot could be quite lucrative.
A lot of the gee-whizz stuff about EVs and grid focuses on the car powering the grid. But most of the benefit comes from opportunistic charging to help renewable rollout.
You can look up the details of what a home charger needs to do to get UK government funding support. I'd imagine Australia will follow suit.
Ahhh, yeah grid demand response appliances are kinda common here (solar inverters and air conditioners). There’s been a few trials and whatnot of smart chargers installed in homes by grid operators:
You’re right - it wouldn’t surprise me if there becomes a standard for EV chargers in Australia that makes it so they have to be centrally controlled to protect the grid/take advantage of excess renewables. Good to do it now before too many homes install EV chargers (probably only 30-40,000 in the country right now).
Probably wouldn’t be too much more effort to add chargers status to it. Or even an API that others can develop apps against (like what we do in Australia for fuel pricing).
I co-founded two EV startups in Australia in 2019 and 2020 that failed at their mission of installing more EV chargers in this emerging market (less than 1% of new car sales are EVs compared to 5% in the US and 10%+ in Europe) and didn't install a single charger.
I did however, learn a fair bit about EV charging - the software that runs them, choosing locations, the electrical needs, how to install chargers, etc. - that someone else with a bit more business sense and access to capital might find useful.
With EV Up it was a rotten co-founder that didn’t follow through on their contract. It poisoned the well, destroyed the trust between us and the remaining co-founders (me and one other person) left. That business still exists and is operating to this day - under new management.
For Park N Plug, missing out on the grant from ARENA was a big kick in the balls as we had investment depending on receiving the grant. When the grant didn’t happen we had no capital. To make things worse, we were relying on the R&D tax incentive to come through on our software platform, but the tax department said it wasn’t eligible despite earlier guidance it was.
That left us out of pocket on developer costs and deflated from the setback. We probably should keep at the software stuff and pivot the business, but my co-founder and I have other businesses we are busy with so the energy hasn’t been there.
This blog post and the reaction to it has been quite positive, so who knows, maybe I’ll try a third time to get something EV charger relate going.
I've got an email newsletter that 874 people pay me $5/m to read (The Sizzle - https://thesizzle.com.au). I set it up outside of Substack a few years ago, then migrated when Substack launched with the hope their platform would bring in new readers and make my life easier.
This turned out to be a massive waste of over a year, as not only did the newsletter stop growing, it lost subscribers. There was no platform effect by being on Substack, so I left it, setup my homebrew solution (where all the bits, like billing, email sending, customer info are interchangeable) and growth has resumed and I'm doing better than ever - all without giving Substack a 10% cut and further locking myself into their ecosystem.
>What I put out there every day is worth the measly $5 a month I charge for it. What worked well for me in the past was giving out a no strings attached free trial of The Sizzle for two weeks then asking people to pay if they want it to continue. Substack’s business model however is freemium content. You give away the bulk of your content to build an audience then upsell that audience with paid subscriber only content. [...] I could add a 14-day free trial to the paid subscription, but Substack doesn’t do free trials without also adding a credit card and automatically charging that card when the trial is over. Most people hate this (me included) as they’re scared they’ll forget to cancel before the trial ends and get charged for something they don’t want, so they just don’t take the risk.
Your model sounds better for professional writers, or already established writers. But the benefit of Substack for emerging writers is that it gives them a platform to establish a brand presence with the hope that it will develop into a large enough audience to get enthusiastic readers who will convert into paid subscribers. There is also no easy way for new writers to try to start a writing career while also trying to figure out different technologies to send out a newsletter. Substack makes it completely easy, and it's fair that they charge some percentage once a writer starts earning money while using their platform.
I don't mean just a lightweight plex client, but a headless plex audio sink. Plex supports , "passing" your stream session over to another client on the local network now, I'm not sure what protocol it is exactly but my Tcl Roku tv is compatible with this and its quite handy to be able to queue some stuff up on the mobile app them send it over there to play rather than fumbling with the remote and the handicapped Roku app.
I’m not convinced EVs as grid response or virtual powerplants will be as important as people think. No EVs on sale right now can do it except the Nissan LEAF and the hardware required (a rectifier) is not cheap (approx A$10k). I’m also sceptical car owners will get much value out of it. Is it worth the hassle just for a few bucks on your electricity bill every month?
Fleets however represent much more of an opportunity. Buses, heavy vehicles (garbage trucks, delivery trucks, etc) and general fleet cars that are idle at night in a depot could be quite lucrative.