THE PSYCHOLOGIST

The silver lining that could recharge Australia's manufacturing

This is a very optimistic article. It is true that Australia mines some of the rare earths used in electric car batteries but most such rare earths are mined more cheaply in China. So there is no clear reason why Australia has any advantage that would cause the fabrication work to be done here

And the article assumes that the demand for electric cars will boom. There is no good sign of that and as the poor performance of electric cars in cold weather and in cold climates becomes well-known, the boom is more likely to be a bust. Anyone with shares in Tesla should sell them now

With the closure of Holden, Australia has reached the end of an era of car manufacturing domestically. Sadly, 100 Holden engineers finished up with the company in Port Melbourne last month, and another 100 are set to leave the company's Lang Lang proving ground in Victoria soon.

This news was so grim that Queensland MP Bob Katter turned up to Parliament House recently dressed as the Grim Reaper himself. Armed with a plastic scythe and flanked by a procession of classic Holden cars, Katter blamed the government for the death of Holden and Aussie manufacturing.

However, as one door closes another door opens. At the former Holden factory in Elizabeth, South Australia, global battery manufacturer Sonnen has opened a battery assembly plant, employing a number of former Holden workers in the process.

Workers like operations supervisor Craig Johnston, whose parents met at the Holden factory and who worked in car manufacturing himself for 25 years before starting a new career in clean energy in 2018. Craig left the Holden factory on a Friday and returned the following Monday to join Sonnen, helping manufacture batteries under the same roof where he once made cars.

Australia has historically had a large and productive manufacturing industry, but the past 30 years has seen this sector decline. Faced with the dual threats of COVID-19 and climate change, is now the time to revitalise Australian manufacturing?

In 2015, the world committed to act on climate change, with the aim of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees. This commitment has sparked a new industrial revolution in zero-carbon technologies such as wind, solar and renewable hydrogen, and zero-carbon commodities such as steel and batteries. Batteries in particular are going to play a substantial role in the global decarbonised economy, helping to power our homes, stabilise our electricity systems and drive millions of cars and buses around the world.

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, global energy storage is set to boom by 2040, and this represents a $662 billion investment opportunity.

The biggest area of energy storage growth will be in lithium-ion batteries, due to their energy density. In the next five years, demand for lithium for the global electric vehicle market alone is likely to increase fivefold.

BNEF anticipates that Australia is one of only 10 countries able to secure three-quarters of this global battery market. The reasons: Australia has the mineral deposits essential to the production of batteries, we are an excellent investment destination, we are an attractive market for small and big scale batteries, and we are close to major markets in Asia.

According to the WA government, Western Australia alone produces nine out of the 10 minerals needed to make lithium-ion batteries.

Now is the time to assertively position Australia as the world's leading battery nation. While we are already the world's largest exporter of lithium ore - spodumene - this just continues our trend of being a "dig it and ship it" nation. A new approach is required if we are to rekindle our manufacturing sector and ensure the full economic value of our resources benefits Australia.

TheAustralian Trade and Investment Commission found Australian lithium realised $213 billion in the global market in 2017, but only 0.53 per cent ($1.13 billion) of this wealth stayed in Australia.

Most of Australia's lithium is exported to China for processing. Afterwards it is sent to Japan and Korea and transformed into battery packs, which are then imported back to Australia and other countries.

However, in the past two years, we have seen the beginnings of an advanced manufacturing battery supply chain develop in Australia. Western Australia has seen the first lithium processing facility, Victoria the first battery recycling facility, and South Australia the first two battery assembly plants.

Then of course there are the thousands of households installing batteries, and the energy companies and governments who are following suit at a community and grid scale. In the ACT, the government is running a tender to deliver one of Australia's largest battery storage facilities, able to power 25,000 homes for two hours when needed.

The remaining gaps are battery component and battery cell manufacturing. The good news is that the Western Australian government's battery manufacturing strategy is looking to target the next step - battery cathode manufacturing. Up in Townsville, there is an ambitious plan to establish a battery cell "Gigafactory".

COVID-19 has demonstrated the fragility of many global supply chains. This in turn is leading to a national conversation about the importance of Australian manufacturing.

If we are serious about both increasing our economic resilience to global crises, stimulating the economy, growing new jobs now and into the future and revitalising this dwindling sector, we need to focus on manufacturing for a clean energy future - and an economic stimulus package for batteries would be a great place to start.

Targeted government support now will unleash a global battery powerhouse that drives investment and jobs right across the value chain from mining to refining, making and recycling.

In Europe, a focus on cleaning up transport as a stimulus measure has buoyed the electric vehicle market, and in turn the global metals and minerals markets.

SOURCE

1 comment:

Looking into the crystal ballAugust 7, 2020 at 11:24 PM
There are some electric cars where I live but I do not how well they perfom during winter which can be cold, windy and harsh. I have nothing but guesses in this matter, and my guess is that electric cars will continue to grow in demand and the batteries they use will get to hold more and more power. But it would be strange if the demand for dependable cars running on gasoline suddenly disappeared.
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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights