2023 Fully Charged Sydney Review: EV Nerds & Newbies Unite!

I just spent all weekend in Sydney at Fully Charged Live; an electric vehicle show. That means electric cars, motorbikes, bikes, scooters, vans, buses, conversions and race cars.

Was it any good? What did I learn? Should you go next year? Read on to find out!

Friday Night: ‘Media Preview’

Before the show, I was a bit worried. How exciting can a room full of static cars be? Will anyone turn up? Or will it just be a crestfallen Robert Llewelyn walking around, thanking a few early adopters for coming and then returning to his hotel to cry into his pillow?

I was still a bit worried at the ‘media preview’ on Friday night. The cavernous hall with only a hundred or so media people in felt eerie.

I found the MG4 unveiling on Friday a little odd. But then, I’ve never been to a car unveiling before. The CEO of MG Motor Australia quietly gave some details about the car and everyone listened respectfully.

Then the big sheet was pulled off, and we all got to see what the MG4 looked like. Even though we already knew because it’s been out in Europe for some time now.

But I’ve gotta say, polished to an inch of its life, in the flesh, it did sparkle and looked like a modern, well-designed, small/medium hatchback. The interior was uncluttered and suited a modern electric car.

I’m not a car guy. I don’t really know what more to say about it. The YouTube car reviewers did, though. They descended onto the car, waxing lyrical into their cameras. I honestly don’t know how they find the words. But then, I guess they wouldn’t have much to say about a solar inverter.

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What did bewilder me about the car launch was this: MG wouldn’t tell us how much it will cost in Australia. Since it has been heralded in Europe as the ‘Bargain Of The Century?‘, that omission seems nutty. That was literally the only detail I wanted to know. I think the shorter-range model will be about AUD $42,000, but don’t hold me to that.

Fully Charged Live: The Weekend

Walking up the stairs at the ICC at 10:30 am Saturday, I soon realised any worries about visitor numbers were misplaced. The queues were frustratingly long. I heard later they had over 9,000 through the door that day.

And as I walked into the hall, it was amazing (but kind of obvious, doh!) what a difference thousands of enthusiastic visitors make. The place was buzzing. It looked like the Fully Charged crew had defied the odds and pulled off a bustling show from their UK HQ at the other end of the planet. That’s no mean feat.

Talking to attendees¹ there was a good mix of diehard early adopter EV nerds and enthusiastic EV newbies looking for information and inspiration.

Nash from Wollongong captured the atmosphere well with his walkaround video:

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People were poring over the EVs on display, and I heard the test drives were going great guns. The Polestars were being poked and prodded within an inch of their Sino/Swedish lives. I suspect Polestar took a shed ton of orders over the two days.

One EV I was really looking forward to seeing was the electric Kombi, the VW ID.Buzz. This was promised in the program but wasn’t actually there. Sad face.

Speaking of no-shows, the only major car manufacturers officially there were Polestar, MG, BYD and LDV. Go China! Boo! to everyone else.

Fully Charged CEO Dan explains here the lengths Fully Charged went to get as many manufacturers present as possible:

They were all approached multiple times over many months, at cost (stand + test drives), AND for free (electric alley), so I put it down to 3 things: 1 – vehicle availability, 2 – not taking us seriously (despite many successful shows globally), 3 – many still don’t want this.

— Dan (FullyChargedDan) Cæsar (@FullyChargedDan) March 12, 2023

Dan fully expects the big brands to show up at Fully Charged Live in Australia next year.

Yes, feels like a snub, but as in the UK and elsewhere the show becomes unignorable. Our shows typically double or treble in size in year 2 once the proof of concept is shown and they know we will ’empty chair’ those that do not attend.

— Dan (FullyChargedDan) Cæsar (@FullyChargedDan) March 12, 2023

Big props to Dan and the crew for going ahead despite the major car manufacturers’ absence. And well done hustling real-world owners to get many of those manufacturers’ cars on display anyway. In my experience, marketing and PR departments in big corporates will only be dragged away from the traditional media kicking and screaming².

My Fully Charged Live Sydney preview blog post lists the cars available for test drives, and on static display. I won’t post pics of all the cars on display, but I will post a pic and specs of my favourite car at the whole show, the Smart EQ.

Smart EQ specifications:

• Body type: Hatchback
• Doors: 2, Seats: 2
• Length: 2.7 m, Width: 1.66 m, Height: 1.55 m
• Curb weight: 1115 kg
• Top speed: 130 km/h
• Acceleration 0-100: 11.5 s
• Drivetrain: Rear-wheel drive (RWD), Automatic
• Battery: 17.6 kWh
• Onboard charger: 22kW (empty to full in 20 min at home!) – Type 2
• Range: 70-160km (real world: 130km)
• The owner’s favourite features: “Heated steering wheel and seats, feels like a zippy go-kart to drive, door close sound has the Merc premium ‘Thoonk’, shit loads of leg room (I’m 6 foot tall and don’t have the seat all the way back), draws the looks at traffic lights.”
• Import from the UK by Top Secret Imports in Blacktown.
• Price: £22,895, Import fees + Duty/ GST: $6264

If you want one of these, you’ll need to import one. And if you want that colour, you’ll need to wrap it. Speaking of wraps, I found out it costs a whopping $4,500 to wrap a Tesla Model 3, and it lasts about seven years.

EV Conversions

I may not be a new-car guy, but I love classic cars. I also love electricity, so I was happy as a pig in poo at all the EV conversions on display.

The craftsmanship on the classic EV conversions was incredible:

There was also an in-progress Range Rover being converted by schoolgirls. Here’s the full story:

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EV Chargers

There were a few EV chargers on display. I won’t bore you with pictures of residential AC wall boxes; you can see them all on our EV Charger comparison chart.

I did have a quick chat with a nice chap at a British company that makes the electronics that go in EV chargers. He was flabbergasted anyone would make an EV charger that is not OCPP³ compatible. I also learned OCPP 2.0 can control bi-directional chargers, so we won’t have the clusterfuck of different protocols for controlling the V2G revolution as we do with solar inverters and home batteries right now. That’s good to know.

Enphase Home Battery

There wasn’t much solar/home battery stuff on show at Fully Charged Live Sydney. Fair enough, it’s an EV show.

But there was an Enphase IQ 5 home battery on display. I’ve seen this battery at a trade show before, but it only dawned on me this weekend how energy dense it isn’t.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all Enphase has is microinverters, everything looks like it should be controlled with microinverters.

Battery Power

But controlling a battery with a microinverter is a silly idea. One problem is requiring 14 x 350W microinverters to handle a continuous battery power of 4.9kW. That means microinverter batteries with decent power output will need huge enclosures for all those micros.

Battery Energy Storage Capacity

To beat the Powerwall’s 13.2 kWh energy storage capacity, you’ll need 3 IQ5 battery boxes and a giant “IQ system controller 2” box that’s almost the same size.

If you want an Enphase home battery, I hope you’ve got a big wall! With the minimum 150mm inter-battery spacing, I think you are looking at over 2.5m of wall space for 14.88 kWh of usable storage. Compare that to a 0.75m wide, 13.2 kWh Powerwall with the gateway box above.

It’s hard enough to find a compliant battery location in Australian houses when you’ve only got one big box to worry about.

Theatre Sessions: Some Gold Nuggets

There were two theatres and 33 sessions – which were all discussions emceed by a charismatic host. As a veteran of many engineering and solar trade events, I’ve got to say that the quality of the discussion was heads and shoulders above what I’m used to at such shows.

I think it comes down to:

• Well-curated hosts who are professional or amateur presenters in their own right (whether that’s TV or YouTube).
• Panels that are (mostly) there because they are legit experts or enthusiasts, not because they work for some corporate.
• No powerpoint presentations!
• Well-chosen, timely topics

While there was not enough in the display hall to keep you there for two days, the quality and quantity of the sessions did justify coming back on Sunday.

Here are some snippets I found interesting. If you’d like me to write up complete sessions, let me know in the comments.

 Why we struggle to get EVs in Australia

Ross De Rango from The Electric Vehicle Council:

“So, demand is oversubscribed. We have far more demand for EVs than EVs coming into the country. The reason is that every other OECD country bar us and Russia has fuel efficiency standards. We don’t. So if you’re a vehicle OEM, you’re a car manufacturer, you produce petrol and electric cars, and you are shipping these to Europe, every petrol car you ship to Europe incurs a $4,000 penalty.

Every electric car you ship gives you a $20,000 rebate against that penalty. We don’t have that here. So for a car maker to ship EVs here, they are foregoing $20,000 in penalty offsets for every car that comes here. So, of course, we’re not gonna get the cars.”

Why we need at least 150% renewables to get 100% renewables

Saul Griffiths; who helped lobby for the mammoth Inflation Reduction Act in the USA:

“the biggest piece of climate legislation in human history. Probably gets rid of 20% of US emissions by 2030”

.. and now lobbies to “set up Australia’s energy system to be the lowest cost for consumers”.

“There’s a great study out about two months ago in the science journal Nature Magazine⁴. And it looks at every country in the world, and it says, how much overcapacity of sunshine and wind do you need if you have 12 hours of storage capacity, to get a hundred percent reliability in your electricity system? Because it’s cheaper to add another 50% of solar for the slightly cloudy days than to add weeks and weeks of batteries.

Anyway, the answer is Australia could do a hundred percent renewable all the time, every day of the year, with 150% wind and solar and 12 hours of storage, which means you don’t need any long-duration storage.

So, this is extraordinary and should blow your mind. What that really implies is that 50% of that 150% will be functionally free electricity. And so we will have this huge amount of excess electricity that has no load. The biggest industrial loads will go after that because that will be the very, very lowest cost electricity if they can modify the times of day they use it.

Saul on what happens to your local economy when we all have electric vehicles and stop buying petrol and diesel:

“We spend 50 billion on foreign oil, which is more than we make in profitable margin on all the gas and coal we export. So, actually looked on like net Australian dollars, we’re already net negative on our fossil fuel industry.

I’ve been thinking about how this problem translates to the community. I see at least one electrified 2515 shirt out there. So, as an example, 2515 is a postcode just out of Sydney. It’s got 4,000 households in it. They spend around 12 to 15 million a year purchasing petrol products. That creates like one job at the local servo and they’re also selling you tobacco and sugar. So three things that kill you.

Then because of studies that Renate has been involved with you look at the potential for a rooftop in our community to generate the electricity that will offset that and we could produce at least half and maybe nearly all of the electricity to run all those cars. If we did that, we’d be keeping 10 million dollars a year in our community.

Once you’ve gold-plated the bowlo and you’ve put solar all over the roof in the surf club, you’ve run out of places to spend 10 million a year in a town of 4,000 people. So, really this is to underscore that part of the Australian renewable energy superpower is we are going to have this extraordinary windfall for local communities if we do this right. And that’s going to come down to how we set the policies around how the local distribution grids deliver electricity.”

How sustainable is it to mine all the materials we need to make all these electric car batteries?

I’ll leave the last word to Professor Ray Wills. This guy is more than a stuffy academic – he’s recently sold the rights to a quarter-billion-dollar solar and storage farm in WA.

“When you’re talking about mining, you can only talk about making it as sustainable as practical. Obviously, if you’re taking virgin material from the ground and using it for the first time, you have to have an extraction. We will reach the point where all the materials that go into a battery are recyclable. But to get to something recyclable, you’ve gotta have volume and scale.

Mining operations, of course, will impact the land that we are extracting from. To put it into perspective, though, we need about 2 million tons of lithium annually. That’s a lot, but we take 2 billion tons of coal year out of the ground. So by replacing the electrical systems from coal and gas power to battery power, we’re reducing the amount of minerals we’re taking outta the planet.

We take around about 1.2 billion tons of iron ore out of the ground a year. So in comparison, the extraction of lithium is tiny. It needs to be sustainable, but, in terms of the scale of impact of human events on mining, lithium and related materials’ impact is far less than fossil fuel extraction.”

Should You Go To Fully Charged Live Australia 2024?

If you are in Sydney or can make an excuse to be in Sydney and are reading this blog, I suspect you’ll enjoy the show in 2024. Expect a much bigger show, more major auto manufacturers, and even an extra day of inspired people getting excited about the clean energy revolution happening before our eyes.

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/fully-charged-live-sydney-review/