The chart doing the rounds today is brutal. Melbourne’s weighted average fuel price sits at $3.02 per litre. The equivalent electricity to drive an Electric Vehicle the same distance? $0.35. That’s 2.13 kWh at 16.3c/kWh. An 88% cost advantage.
It lines up neatly with The Driven’s reporting that petrol and diesel prices are soaring while EV fast-charging costs are actually falling. Two lines on a graph heading in opposite directions. The crossover story writes itself.
But here’s the thing. The price gap, while staggering, might be a short-term aberration. Middle East tensions ease, OPEC adjusts, a refinery comes back online and the gap narrows. Petrol has been cheap before and it will be cheap again. If you’re making the case for electrification purely on today’s fuel price, you’re building on sand.
The real argument is energy independence.
Australia imports virtually all of its refined fuel. We hold somewhere around 20-30 days of supply at any given time, well below the 90-day IEA obligation we’ve been failing to meet for years. Every litre of petrol or diesel that goes into an Australian vehicle is a litre we didn’t produce, refined from crude we didn’t extract, shipped on vessels we don’t control, priced in a currency we don’t set.
That is a structural vulnerability and it doesn’t go away when oil is cheap. It just hides.
Meanwhile, Australia has some of the best renewable energy resources on the planet. Solar irradiance that most countries would kill for. Wind corridors running down the southern coastline. A grid that is decarbonising faster than almost anyone predicted. The electricity that powers an EV today is increasingly generated here, from resources that are ours, using infrastructure we own.
When you charge an EV from rooftop solar, the cost drops to effectively zero and the supply chain is your roof. Even on the grid, the generation is domestic. No tanker routes through the Strait of Hormuz. No refinery margins set in Singapore. No geopolitical risk premium baked into your Tuesday morning commute.
That $0.35 eLitre is compelling. But the real number that matters is zero. Zero barrels of imported oil. Zero exposure to someone else’s supply disruption. Zero dependence on a commodity market that treats Australia as a price-taker.
Electrify everything we can. Not because it’s cheap today (though it is). Because relying on imported oil when you’re sitting on an ocean of renewable energy is a choice we should stop making.
The eLitre chart referenced above is from elitre.com.au, a concept originally developed by Simon Holmes à Court. It calculates the electricity cost to drive an average EV the same distance as one litre of fuel in an average ICE vehicle. It uses Melbourne’s weighted average fuel price, average ICE fuel consumption (per Green Vehicle Guide), average EV efficiency (per ev-database.org) and a residential electricity rate of 16.3c/kWh.
Sources:
- The Driven (thedriven.io)
- eLitre (elitre.com.au)
- Simon Holmes à Court (x.com)