Has China saved electrification & is Australia a canary in the 'clean' coal mine?

30:00Hopefully not. Hopefully it'll be simply recyclable as it all should be. And as we improve our recycling ecosystem, and we talked about this last time when we mentioned when we were talking in Brisbane a couple of years ago, we talked about Jim Chalmers and his need to support a battery recycling ecosystem in Australia. Sadly, two years on, we haven't got it. But I'm going to keep talking about it until we do. He won't be able to shut me up. Well, maybe he can. I don't know what resources he has. But I guess the critical part here is your conclusion about batteries being fundamental. Without renewables, we couldn't have had batteries become important.

30:42But because of renewables, batteries have become important and are indeed the biggest gain. You can look at the data exports from China, and Ember have been putting out some charts on this, and I included some in my post back to you. And what that shows is that the value of solar exported by China peaked in about 2024, I think the year was. So the graph went up and now the graph's going down, despite the fact that the export volume is through the roof, solar's just cheaper. And so even though you're selling lots more solar panels, it's actually not more money's worth than you did two or three years ago, which was the peak of solar in terms of export value.

31:23But the thing that's crept up with that has been the export of batteries continuing to climb. and then just slightly lagging behind, but in the last couple of months, has the value of electric vehicles exported from China is now higher than the value of all batteries. Now, EVs are obviously counting their own batteries internally, but there's batteries you export and then there's products with batteries in them like EVs which get counted separately. So raw battery exports, there you go. But now EVs are outselling in terms of value of product. EVs are now outselling batteries as a value return to China.

32:05It's not surprising. You make things more complex and charge people more money for them. Of course you make more money out of it. And that's where we're seeing China really excel at this point. China is now doing not just wind and solar and batteries, but they're doing heat storage. They're doing induction pumps. They're doing robots. They're doing all of these other things. And on the chart of vehicles, the thing that China has now the biggest share of out of everything, 80 % share of solar, 80 % share of EVs, but 90 % share of heavy-duty electric vehicles. So most of the world's electric vehicles are most certainly going to come from China.

32:48and unless Europe picks up the game in terms of motivating forward. And it's kind of there. I sent you another little lovely chart that showed that China and Thailand are doing extraordinarily well in the electrification race. And Europe is just sort of hanging in the middle and down the bottom is the US and down below US is Japan. Japan are doing really badly. And Michael Lieberich made a wonderful comment in a talk that he gave and he talked about America, the petrostate. And he talked about that because everybody had started talking about the electrostate. So then he referred to China as the electrostate.

33:28And then he referred to Europe and he said, ah, Europe, the state of confusion. That's so true. Because they're trying to do climate, but they're not trying to be strong enough about it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, there are sort of, there's kind of exceptions because one of the things that which I don't really remember happening to this degree other than with Tesla is the Renault 5. So the Renault 5, we went to the launch. It's amazing. We loved it. Everyone raved about it. You know, all the journalists raved about it. And often that happens and then you don't see anything. I now go out on the road.

34:04I'll see 40 Renault 5s on the road between here and a local town. I mean, they've been incredibly popular. That's a European designed, European manufactured car, probably with Chinese batteries. But, you know, so it's such a perfect example of confusion because equally the cars I don't notice are all the Renaults with a combustion engine, of which there's far more. And the work we've been doing, so Raphael Wellman, he's a German analyst, has joined us. He often puts out magic graphs that I think are a really good way of portraying how the changes are coming. and Raphael's data was showing us that actually France is doing better than Germany in terms of its adoption of electric vehicles and its production of electric vehicles.

34:54Now, in one sense, Germany's not winning, so therefore France isn't winning either, but they're just beating Germany. But in the other sense, you know, it's better than being on the bottom. Yeah. And, I mean, it's noticeable in terms of infrastructure. I mean, I drove through France very recently, and you'll stop at a supermarket. I mean, I've talked about this endlessly, but you stop at a supermarket and there isn't, like in the UK, there might be four rapid chargers in one corner of a big supermarket car park. We went to one, there was 47 Tesla superchargers and over 350 kilowatt rapid chargers from another company.

35:32So it was miles of chargers. And also the whole car park covered in solar panels. And that was in France. You're not seeing that in Germany yet. Yeah. No, no. Nor are we seeing it in Australia. Yeah, yes. Well, I mean, the changes I've seen in Australia in the last 10 years are remarkable. I mean, it is, there has been. I mean, it's still my favourite Australian electric car charging point anecdote is I went, and I can't remember where it was. It wasn't that far from, where's the dog sitting on the tucker box? it's in that area yeah yeah bendigo bendigo it's that it's that area there was a like a oh no what is it called um god no neither don't worry it's a b-word anyway that it's um gundagai gundagai is a g word just ignore my last sentence we can edit that bit out can't we okay but the it was somewhere in that it wasn't at gundagai but it's near there there was just a you know petrol station and around the back there were four or four or five newly installed chargers i think the um racq whoever it was one of those companies but one of them and they were operational but one of them had big deep ridges in the concrete where someone had reversed to plug in when the concrete was still wet which shows that there was a but it was such a i used it because it was so easy once your tire just dropped into the it was like being on a train It just went to the right point.

37:06You know, you didn't have to steer. A design innovation, a la Australia. Yes, it was. Yes. But then... And just before we move on from that, the other thing that's been significantly announced a couple of days ago by Chris Bowen, the energy minister here, is that he's expanding assistance for panels beyond rooftop systems of homes to rooftop systems of industries. And so we're now going up to one megawatt assistance for rooftop solar, which is extraordinary. But it just means that the large expanses of industrial parks that are out there can finally cover their rooftops. That is so frustrating.

37:50I mean, it's brilliant to hear that. And so frustrating to hear that here in this country where that isn't the case. And it should be. And everybody's raving about why aren't all the big warehouses covered in solar power. I mean, some of them are, but most of them aren't, and it is such an obvious thing. Car parks and buildings is where we should definitely be festooned. Yeah, look, I've got an interesting business anecdote there, and it comes from a few years back, but I think it's still relevant, is that I spoke to a number of business guys who were not putting solar on the roof. I said, look, you've got this magic roof.

38:20You've got all that space. He said, but we only work five days a week, and so on the weekend we don't get paid for any electricity we port. we export. So therefore, we don't want to give our electricity for free to the power utility. So the only way we can do that is not to have solar because we don't want to give the government something for free in a very Australian accent. Yes. And, you know, I think while there was no business case for it, even if they had given it away for free, they still would have been paying a lot less for their electricity than they would have. Yes. This will change that, though.

38:58This will bring in the cusp of change that we needed for here. Yeah, yeah. Because that is one thing I would love to talk to you about, because I think what, and this, again, may be my misinterpretation, but it feels like the adaption of the grid in Australia is in advance of anywhere else that I know. I mean, certainly in advance of us here in the UK, definitely in the USA. say, you know, it feels like you've had enough rooftop solar long enough for it to have had an impact on the energy market in general for people to go, maybe we should change this a bit. I mean, because, well, one of the things that we're absolutely screwed by in this country is our electricity price is governed by the price of gas, which, as you can imagine, in the last few years, has meant that our electricity prices have gone up enormously.

39:50And yet we are still, like today, we will be 70, 80 % renewably powered because it's a sunny, windy day. Yeah, I mean, there's three critical tipping points involved, and it's just maths. Really, once you get above 50 % renewable penetration, your grid changes. But until you get there, something else controls it. While it's below 50%, and in our context and your context, gas controls the market. But as soon as you push it over 50%, then 50 % of the time, It's renewables that are setting the price. And so that works pretty well. But actually the sun, just like the sceptics say, the sun doesn't shine every day as much as it could.

40:33And so therefore you've got to be able to do something with that. And the wind doesn't blow. Yeah, yeah, okay. But we add batteries into this. And the critical number for Australia for the batteries has been a 2 % penetration of batteries per day in the grid has been sufficient to shave the top off the gas price. So you've got renewables pushing this stuff down, but when it gets a bit variable and gas has to cut in, the price has spiked back up again, except that batteries are cutting off the top of the gas because they're competing in that peaking market. And when they do that, combined with the renewables, that's what's been the really pivotal swing in the wholesale price for Australia has started to fall for pretty much the last 12 months or so, about 14 months.

41:23It's started to come down. It's coming down a lot faster now. It's being reflected in the wholesale price. The wholesale price moves on to set the retail price. The retail price is regulated in our case and until the Australian energy market regulator goes, oh, yeah, it's coming down, it's coming down, it's coming. Okay, I can reset the retail price now. and they've just announced they intend to do that soon. Right. Sometime soon. Yes. Very exciting. But, I mean, presumably the other thing is that I'm assuming that in Australia the generating capacity of gas and coal is not increasing, whereas the storage capacity from batteries is increasing and will continue to increase.

42:07Would that be a fair...? Yes, so the amount of storage we've got this year so far to the month of July, I think the date of, yeah, it's now August. Yes, okay, that works. To the month of July is now double the amount of storage we had last year. Right. So big change. That's working pretty well. And the growth rate of storage is extraordinary because not only is it happening, that's only measuring utility storage. We're now also getting this domestic storage going on and domestic storage now exceeds utility storage in Australia, which is actually the same that happens in Germany. Germany, the largest share of the market is actually domestic storage.

42:51And they've got around just north of 20 gigs in total, about 18, I don't quite remember the numbers, but about 18 out of their 20 is domestic storage. That's not particularly well measured in the same way that we had trouble measuring how our impact of our solar rooftops were going because it's behind everybody's meter. We now do that mostly through an estimate. But it's important to be able to measure things. You know, the engineers will tell you if you can't manage what you can't measure, famous old phrase, and they're right. And so one of the things we're lacking is really good data that's extensive, and deep.

43:35We're pushing the point now for data management. Ironically, at the same time, we're controversially talking about data centres and, oh my God, they're going to destroy the planet. I've got a view of that. If they're carefully planned and they're powered by renewables, we'll be fine. But it's just a matter of ensuring that because a smart energy future is going to need data. And that data has to be managed and stored and processed somewhere. And we can all do it on our laptops, but we tried that with the SETI program. We never found any aliens. You know what SETI was? Yeah, we did that. But we've gone past that point now.

44:18We've gone back to the point where we actually have centrally powered computers that are doing a grunt load of work. We need that to happen because there's so much data we need to manage effectively and by the second so that we can manage our energy grids and so that we can manage our plug-ins of our electric cars and all the data that flows from that. Yes. And, I mean, I think the next step, I mean, it's certainly just starting here, is the fact that you can use your car as a battery for your house or for the grid. And, I mean, that's, you know, it's been talked about for so long it's actually annoying and boring.

44:54but you know it is it is such an obvious next step you know if there is now over two million electric cars in the uk if they were all plugged in and and the national world could take one kilowatt hour out of each of them i mean you know it's an absurd notion but if they could that's a nuclear power plant that's a new nuclear power plant uh victoria did a inquiry into um electrification of fleet and that we answered that call. We wrote a submission to them. We gave them evidence. It was a fun inquiry and it was great to participate because they actually used a lot of our stuff. It was really cool.

45:34Oh, good. But the relevance there was they on the spot, they asked me, well, you know, how much battery storage can all these EVs give us? And I did a quick back of the envelope and it's not going to come back to me now because I don't remember what their starting number was, but I multiplied it by an 80-kilowatt battery system and I say, well, that would be about four gigs of power, I think was the number I came up with. And I go, huh, look at that. And we're not even using it because we don't have vehicle to grid yet and we've got to be able to do that. So it really is. I don't think vehicle to grid will be day-to-day something you do, but during the periods where there's a crisis and there's an energy shortage, there will be rewards for people that are prepared to plug their cars in vehicle to grid.

46:20And those that have to travel a long way tomorrow aren't going to do it. But only 10 % of us ever travel a long way. So the other 9 % of us can just plug in. Yeah. I mean, it was actually a Dutch engineer that I spoke to a few years ago who sort of wanted to remove the myth that the grid would empty the battery of a car. He said, we need one kilowatt hour. from a million vehicles and we can run the country. You know, it isn't, you don't drink, you take a bit from each one. You've got to use this distributed very widely. I mean, that was quite interesting. And for the most part, the car makers that are setting their cars up to do V2G are restricting it to only 20 % of the vehicle.

47:03So they can't take more than that. That's all that the car software will allow. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, that is, I mean, I think what the other driving force I think we should mention is the, I always call him the orange emperor, I shouldn't, but you know, the fact that a war was started with one of the world's major oil supplies and where, you know, with a gap in the sea that all the ships that can carry oil to the, all around the world have to go through, you know, really messed things up. And there are two big things that messed everything of the old system was Russia invading Ukraine and the war in Iran.

47:43And it's just like, you know, the impact that's had, I feel, psychologically on the British population is, oh, hang on, this stuff that we buy that comes in isn't secure. Forget the climate impact, forget tree hugging, forget everything. It's not a secure supply of fuel. Whereas the wind and the sun, it's exactly, it's turned that argument on its head. there's one thing we can rely on, and that's wind and sun. We can't rely on gas and oil. It's lovely. It's almost like they created a place of biblical proportions and they said none shall pass unless you go through the straight humours. That's all you've got left.

48:24And the critical thing about this particular crisis is that with the last three oil crises starting in 75, we didn't have a technology to replace it. No. Now we do. A lot's been said about how quickly China's ramped up. But really, China's ramping up really quickly, yes, but that's only after about 10 or 15 years of planning. And 10 or 15 years of planning that was stated in the five-year plans, we're going to build cars, we're going to build cars. Okay, now we're going to build electric cars and we're ready to do that. And, oh, COVID came along. There was a bit of a speed bump as China was about to release in 2019.

49:08All car companies went like that. So did China, but China's only did a little bit. But then China just launched from 2021. It's gone from being the fifth biggest car, fifth or sixth biggest car exporter to now number one. It's now beating Japan. And that extraordinary growth, people are going, oh, gee, they snuck that one in. Oh, no, they didn't. They told us about 15 years ago that this is what they're going to do. Yes. If only the Spires had to read the fifth five-year plan. Yeah. Because, I mean, that is – I mean, that – one of the statistics I read from you is that the global – well, because, you know, I've often wondered what that impact is and is it having an impact on the oil industry, the transition to electric vehicles.

49:55Global EV fleet has displaced 1.8 million barrels a day globally. I mean, that is – is that noticed? noticed have the oil industry noticed the answer is yes it is because uh 1.8 million barrels is is a bit over um you know it's there's it's a bit over one and a half percent because i you know rough rule of thumb about 100 million barrels you cheat a lot you just say oh there's two uh so that's about two percent of the oil industry when you move two percent of the oil industry you affect pricing china's actually just said we don't need two percent of the oil anymore There's a lot been said about China and the Hummus Strait and how China last year, when oil was really cheap last year, in relative terms compared to the last three or four years, China filled up all of its oil reserves.

50:46And one of the things that they've been doing strategically is depleting their oil reserves this year. So China's got massive oil reserves. I can't give you a number in the top of my head, but it's back there somewhere. But they filled up, literally filled up all their tanks. Now, Australia has only got up to 45 % of its tanks full. I don't know what Europe is doing, what the UK is doing in that strategic oil reserve capacity, but their tanks won't be full. They'll only be about half full. The US had filled up their tanks, and I don't know whether you've heard this story or not, but Trump allowed Exxon Mobil to sell the US fuel reserves this year to ensure that the US was not short of oil.

51:28and he made the deal with them said that for every dollars worth you take out you got to put a dollar 20 back in or no i think i think it was a volume not a not a value so about every dollar you take you got to put it give us back a dollar 20 and they went oh yeah that's fine we can do that so we'll keep selling all this oil while it's still dear and then when the time comes to refill your tanks we'll buy the oil cheaper but right replace it at 1.2 and everybody will make money and and Donald Trump says, I love a good deal. And so that's what they've done. They're reaching the point now, though, where there's pressure on their oil reserves that they've really got to start refilling, same time that their missile reserves seem to be surprisingly low.

52:11I don't know what they've been doing with all those missiles, but apparently they've gone too. And so we've got this situation where normally after an oil crisis, There's about two years, if you look at the data, there's about two years where it hangs on and then it starts to slide again. So we'd got to the end of our two years of Russia impacting through the Ukraine and the oil crisis there. We got through about two years and oil had been starting to slide a little. Yeah. But this just boosted it back up, but actually not as far as we expected. And part of the reason for that is because Trump said to ExxonMobil, you can sell the oil.

52:53and so that took the pressure off the US market and that took the pressure off of imports. But in the meanwhile, China had said, well, we don't need that 2 % anymore, so bye. And so there was a surprise that China didn't need as much oil from hummus as before. As expected, yeah. All of this global oil politics is being disassembled by China. Right. And, you know, again, going back to Liebricht's comment that China's the electric state, I don't think he created that particular observation, but he made use of it in such a clever way. Yeah. And it's just true. And they're going gangbusters, which isn't that a term for an oil well, gangbusters?

53:38I don't know. But China are just doing extraordinary things because they can. They're a manufacturing behemoth and they can produce goods in record time of record quality. And this is the other part that's coming, is that people, going back to your earlier comment about how we rate Chinese goods, there was a view 10 years ago, and perhaps deservedly, that Chinese goods weren't as good. But the nicest car I've ever driven in my life, and I've been fortunate, I've owned a couple of Beamers, I've had a Mercedes, I've had a Ford as well. but the quality of the Zika that I have is just remarkable. It's a beautiful car to drive.

54:22It's far better than the Beamer I used to own and it's just a good car. It's a quality car. We didn't expect that 10 or 15 years ago but now we just do and the critical part of that is the manufacturing techniques coming from China, robotisation. Many of their factories are robotic and that brings quality. You remove the human out of the equation. Now, China has a skill shortage just as the rest of us do, but they're solving it with robotics, whereas we're hesitant because we're worried that if we solve our job problems in the UK or Australia with robotics, we're going to put people out of work.

55:03But the workforce has never been better. you know Australia's workforce unemployment rate is currently 4.4 percent according to the Reserve Bank just today we talked about the Reserve Bank last time we met in Brisbane too we could have solved their problems but the the and the phrase back then was what does the Reserve Bank do with free we were talking about the reducing costs of energy and we're talking about and back then two years ago we were describing what was about to happen to the gas system and the battery system and the way it played in there. And what we described actually happened. And that's what we've experienced now in this last 12 to 14 months when prices have declined.

55:45So I don't know what took me down that path, but it was a lot of fun going there. It's a good lot of fun. But, I mean, we have to wind up fairly soon, but one of the bits of information that struck me, and I just am so unaware of it, is the prediction that Australian imports of cars from Thailand will overtake imports from cars from China. And I'm thinking, I didn't know a lot of cars were even made in time. Not China, Japan. They'll overtake Japan. Oh, sorry, they'll overtake Japan. I beg your pardon. Yes, yes. Oh, okay. They won't catch China in a heartbeat because they're at such a time. No, I was going to say.

56:21But the logic there is that China is building a lot of vehicles. What we've found is that there's a great indicator. If you build a lot of electric cars at home, you tend to sell a lot of electric cars overseas too because your factories make them and that's China it's also Thailand if you build a lot of if you don't build a lot of electric cars at home that's the USA or Japan you tend not to have electric cars to sell to everybody so you don't export very many it's really just a simple metric but it really does explain the difference between China and now Thailand, particularly because Thailand is seen by China as an industrial ally and there's a lot of Chinese companies like BYD and Yealy are going into Thailand to build their factories.

57:12Because Thailand has made some really good tax concessions for companies that come and build a factory in Thailand and export stuff and China's gone, well, we're building a lot of cars and we need to build more factories, why don't we build some in Thailand and make use of that southern Asian market in a focused way? If you stick a car on a ship for a row-row, if you can take it a long journey or a short journey, it's better that you don't have to double handle it. Yeah, I see. Yeah, so Southeast Asia is going to buy a lot of Thai cars. And who in Southeast Asia are buying a lot of Thailand cars?

57:54Singapore and Indonesia. Indonesia is the second fastest take-up of electric cars in the world. It's quite extraordinary. And it's only been beaten by, and this is a smaller metric, but it's only been beaten by, I want to say Nepal, but it's not Nepal. It's the wonderful country nearby where everybody goes to retreat.

58:17I'm happy about that. I'm glad you do this too because it's exactly what I do. It's the same as mine, isn't it? I know you can see images of that country and you know that they're very… They're banging gongs and they're singing and they do that in Nepal anyway. Yeah. What's the world's happiness index country? But it's not the one up in the Himalayas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one. Yes. Yes, the happiest country in the world. They're just doing gangbusters on electric cars. They've just said we import all our oil. It's got to come up a hill. We've got sunshine. We've got wind. we've got all this renewables, we've got hydro we can make it home we're both going to remember can we put in a slight overwritten part where we actually name the country I'll do it as a lower third because we'll both remember the name of this country, it's going to come to me in a minute.

59:08Hang on, are you ready?

59:13But okay but the sort of that your statistics about Singapore, because I used to go to Singapore regularly on my way to Australia with my kids when they were little, and we'd stay there, and it was amazing, and I loved being there. Particularly in the UK winter, you know, you get off a plane in Singapore and go, oh, thank goodness, especially with small children. It was wonderful. But that, I mean, I hadn't really kept up with that, that the percentage of new car sales, it makes Norway look embarrassing. I mean, it's basically they just buy electric cars now. They don't bother with anything else.

59:50Yeah, Norway can deserve to hold itself with pride with the work that it's done over a decade. But China's going to, sorry, China, Singapore's going to do it in about three years. Yeah, that's extraordinary. And now, look, you know, there are elections in Singapore. It's a democratic state. Yeah. But it's also one that's very comfortable with central control. and Lee Kuan Yew was a marvellous statesman that showed people that they can trust the government and because they trust the government, when we make a decision, you guys just have to do it and everybody's got a smile and they generally do and they don't chew gum.

1:00:29But that's okay because it's working. And Indonesia is a bit different. Indonesia is a petro state in the sense that it exports a lot of oil but it also uses a lot of oil at home. and Indonesia has always subsidised its oil to its citizens. Right. So it costs them, I think, around, it's in billions, the 20s of billions or 30s of billions of dollars, it costs them internally to subsidise oil. If they put their population onto electric cars, suddenly all of their oil is just export. Yeah. So they not only save the subsidy but they gain the profit of the export. Now they're also looking to build a car industry and China's come into Indonesia going, yeah, yeah, we see you, Nicole.

1:01:16We see all of your copper reserves. They're going to be important in electric cars and when we build factories, we'll be able to use that as a supply chain input. So Indonesia's gone tickety-boo, let's do that, and they are. So they're just going extraordinarily fast. Whereas Singapore is threatening to do it in three or four years, Indonesia is threatening to do it in two or three. Right. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And to be fair, a lot of them are two - and three-wheelers. Right. Yes. Yes. Well, I mean, that was the most noticeable thing I saw in China was the scooters. Yes. The scooters and mopeds and rickshaws.

1:01:55It was just extraordinary, the numbers of those, where any argument you've got about the continuation of burning fossil fuels in a two-stroke engine, just forget it. I don't think I saw one. They're probably not allowed, but I didn't see one combustion-engined scooter thing. Yeah, look, I didn't hear that sound. You hear about one in, I reckon it would be one in a couple of thousand. They were still there. Yeah, maybe. And, you know, one of them, you know, one guy was wearing a leather jacket, so of course his was making noise. But aside from that, there were a couple there, but clearly I don't know enough about what the replacement program was to incentivise that, but I think ultimately they just weren't building the other ones um so if you wanted to buy a scooter it was going to be electric baby an electric one yeah yeah no i mean that is so that was one of my favorite moments was i went out for a walk early one morning there was a lot of people going to work right in the middle of shanghai and it was i could hear birds singing in the trees and there's thousands of scooters going past me not one or two thousands you know just a constant flow but they were i went i can i can smell cigarettes then i realized that half the people on the scooters had a cigarette as they But right along in there, clean energy scooters, it was still smoking.

1:03:11Yeah, yeah, no. I don't know if somehow it tickled me. It's still combustion of a form. It's still a bit of combustion going on. Ray, I just want to say it is such a joy to talk to you, your enthusiasm, your knowledge and everything. And also I think we're both blessed being, you know, I'll be cruel to both of us, being a couple of old duffers who are witnessing this incredible transition in the sort of latter part of our lives. kind of keeps my brain fairly healthy. It's like a brain gym trying to understand batteries and solar and wind and grid infrastructure and the politics that surround it.

1:03:47It's a healthy thing to be involved with. I think we're both of those. I've been really fortunate. I first got involved with talking about energy efficiency and renewable energy in 2003. Right, right. And then I went on to work with West Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry where I became their energy advisor and then I went on to be the head of the Sustainable Energy Association of Australia, which is about when we first met. Yes. And so in that time I've had a grand opportunity to understand it fundamentally in a way that I wasn't, I was youngish then but not, you know, I'm 20 years older now.

1:04:28um and so uh uh one of the things that i'm doing with peter newman is this uh overarching look at all things whether it's about this planning of a precinct and where you put a bus depot so that there's charging stations for trucks as well or whether you plan that for a community battery to be attached to it now we've just built five bus depots here in perth um and none of them are connected to the community they're all end of the fence and only two of them have any solar on them and not enough to make a difference to their precinct. What are they thinking? And it's government owned. So if we're going to see leadership from government, we need to see practitioner execution by government as well.

1:05:10They need to be thinking better about integrated planning. We all know stories, and yes, Minister trained us all about politics, but we all know stories about the absence of integrated planning and the importance of silos to keep the others away because this is our idea. This has got to be the collaborative age. We have to actually have better collaboration and that actually extends to China. We've got to collaborate better with China because they can deliver the product that will save our asses.

1:05:50Well, I really hope you enjoyed that. We both had a bit of a mental block. It was very amusing. We worked out immediately after the recording the name of the country, Bhutan, that we were talking about, which isn't the right country anyway, as you can see from the graphics there. But other than that, what an amazing man. What an absolute joy to talk to, Ray. We'll definitely get him back on the podcast soon. That's all. Please do tell your friends and relatives about Everything Electric and what we're doing on YouTube and our live events. And please subscribe if you haven't already. And as always, if you have been, Thank you for watching.

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