The Guardian has been running some articles on the long-delayed Inland Rail project, proposed to carry freight between Melbourne and Brisbane (or possibly, if Barnaby Joyce has his way) Melbourne and Gladstone. Apart from the usual megaproject problems of delays, cost overruns, mid-project redesigns and so on, there appears to be a fundamental and unfixable conflict in the thinking behind the project.

To have any prospect of economic success, the rail line has to get a large share of the market from Melbourne to Brisbane (or at least some destination in Queensland). At a minimum that means beating the existing rail route via Sydney. The article suggests that shippers like Woolworths want a transit time less than 24 hours.

But to deliver any of the proposed benefits to towns along the way, trains have to stop at lots of different places, which means travelling more slowly between them. I’m not a railway man, but putting slow vehicles with frequent stops into any transport system slows everyone down.

I’m not expecting much from an Albanese government, except getting rid of the current gang. But I hope Albo expresses his well known love of trains by putting Inland Rail in the deep freeze, and using our scarce resources to upgrade the main Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane.

The era of zero real interest rates (for savers) makes all sorts of calculations simpler. I started looking at the choice between electric vehicles (EVs) and comparable cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) and ran into a bunch of issues about depreciation, time horizons, resale values and so on.

But there’s one way of making the comparison very simple. Consider someone who buys a car for cash and drives it until its value reaches zero and it is scrapped. (For the moment, don’t worry about the fact that not many people do this.) Further, assume that the best alternative is to save the money, at zero real interest, for example by buying long term bonds.

The final simplification is to assume that both cars travel the same distance in their lifetimes before being scrapped. That seems reasonable. Most estimates suggest that the battery in an EV can last for at least 150000km, and an ICE car that has been driven that far is worth a few thousand dollars at the most (I should know!). At a stretch, we could say 200000km for both.

In this case, we can simply compare the difference in purchase price with the lifetime savings in running costs. A standard estimate is that the fuel and maintenance costs of an EV are about 15c/km less than those of a comparable ICE (10c/km for fuel and 5c/km for maintenance). So, the lifetime savings come to between $22500 and $30000 for the EV. That seems comparable to price differences observed in the market.

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As usual, 26 January has been marked by protests, denunciations of those protests, and further iterations. Even apart from the fact that it marks an invasion, the foundation of a colony that later became one of Australia’s states isn’t much of a basis for a national day.

A logical choice would be the day our Federation came into force. Unfortunately for this idea, our Founders chose 1 Jan 1901. The first day of the 20th century[1] must have seemed like an auspicious choice for a new country, but it ruled out the anniversary as a national day.

The ideal thing would be to fix the problems of our current system with a republican constitution including a treaty with the original owners of our land. That would provide a date really worthy of celebration.

In the meantime, I suggest 3 March, the anniversary of the day in 1986 when the Australia Act came into force, finally establishing beyond any doubt that Australia is an independent country, entirely separate from the UK[2]. We had by 1986 a constitution and public policy that was at least formally non-racist, thanks to the 1967 referendum and the end of the White Australia policy. Many of the symbolic problems with the current date would be avoided, though the real injustices would remain to be addressed.

It’s true that the Australia Act doesn’t have a lot of resonance. But any date with a lot of resonance is bound to resonate badly for a large proportion of the population. At least this would be a choice nearly all of us could celebrate without worrying too much about its precise significance.

fn1. At least if you start the count from 1CE. I think it would be more sensible to cross-label 1BCE as 0 CE, making 1900 the start of C20. I had always assumed that Dionysius Exiguus, who invented the AD calendar was unaware of the concept of zero, but Wikipedia accords him a prominent role in its history.

fn2. Whether, when and to what extent, we had become an independent country before 1986 remains a mystery, but there’s no doubt after that.

A fun and often useful way of getting perspective on events from what seems like the relatively recent past is to take the time interval between those events and the present, then count back an equal time into the past [1].

For example, The Beatles first big hit, Love me Do, came out 60 years ago, in 1962. Going back 60 years to 1902, the hits of that year included Scott Joplin’s ragtime number The Entertainer. The recent buzz around Get Back can be compared to the revival of interest in Joplin generated by the Newman-Redford movie The Sting[2]

A more memorable event for most who were alive at the time was the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, that is, 59 years ago. Going back 59 years gets us to 1904, only three years after the previous US Presidential assassination, that of William McKinley. At least according to Wikipedia, the immediate reaction to the McKinley assassination was comparable to that after Kennedy’s. However, McKinley was overshadowed by his successor, Teddy Roosevelt in a way that didn’t happen with LBJ and JFK. So, AFAICT, McKinley’s assassination was pretty much forgotten by the time of Kennedy’s election[2]

As far as left politics goes, a comparable observation that the events of May 1968 are closer to the October Revolution than to the present.

Looking at intervals like this gives an idea of whether change has been fast or slow. For example, the beginning of the Jet Age of passenger jet transport is commonly dated to the introduction of the Boeing 707 in 1958, but there’s also a case for the 747 introduced in 1969. Counting back from these two dates gives a range from 1894 to 1916, neatly bracketing the Wright Brothers in 1903. The massive advances from the Wright Brothers to the early 7x7s contrast sharply with the near-stasis since then (punctuated by the failure of the Concorde). Today’s 7x7s and their Airbus competitors differ most notably in the fact that the passengers are packed in tighter, and more effectively pacified with digital entertainment. The newer planes are more fuel efficient, safer and not quite as noisy, but those are incremental advances in an industry that used to symbolise modernity and technical progress.

That’s enough from me. Anyone else have a favorite?

fn1. The first time I saw this was in a look back at at an ANU Revue, during the Vietnam years, on the theme Hits of the Blitz. The author pointed out that the Vietnam War was now further in the past than WWII had been at the time the show was put on.
fn2. Doing the same thing for The Sting (1973) takes us back to the silent era and The Thief of Baghdad
fn2. Some fans of numerology noted that the winners of the 1860, 1880, 1900 and 1960 elections had been assassinated. Adding the 1840, 1920 and 1940 winners, who died in office (though Roosevelt survived his third term, and won again in 1944), this produced the “Curse of the Zero Years”

Most discussion of energy storage that I’ve seen has focused on batteries, with occasional mentions of pumped hydro. But in the last week, I’ve seen announcements of big investments in quite different technologies. Goldman Sachs just put $250 million ($US, I think) into a firm that claims to worked out the bugs that have prevented the use of compressed air storage until now

And several companies are working on gravity storage (raising and lowering massive blocks) to store and release energy

Underlying these points is a crucial fact in physics/engineering: Any reversible physical process is an energy storage technology.

That’s why concerns about the variability of wind and solar power will come to nothing in the end

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