That's not an apples with apples economic comparison. The infrastructure cost of producing liquid fuels (overseas), shipping, transporting and providing them at such remote locations must be colossal, not to mention the fuel consumed and pollution created in that lengthy process. Alongside which, the fixed costs of installing solar panels and batteries seem pretty trivial.
As a bonus, Australia doesn't have to keep buying those endless rivers of fuel and being vulnerable to any interruptions to supply. Once the solar installation is in place, it pretty much takes care of itself and the setup cost will be soon recovered by motorists paying for recharges.
No, it is not if it were only the Nullarbor roadhouse, but there has to be a charging station every 250 km at the least for a reliable service (which is better than the 20-25 charges than he required, equal to worse than 150 km per charge). Petrol stations don;t exist at that spacing, much less towns. At present the cost of a battery and solar cells sufficient to produce around 8 KwH on a day with full sun all day is around $20,000 in the city. The average EV car battery stores 40-90 KwH (so you need this amount to fill it - I guess one such setup would fill one car per day at best on sunny days, a fraction of what a truck needs). That is one car. How many vehicles cross the Nullarbor per day? At the moment there are 240 vehicles on the highway just west of Ceduna to the WA border, many of them heavy transports. Life of a battery about 10 years (7 year warranty) a bit more for the cells (10 year warranty) - solar systems don't last forever any more than fuel systems. So multiply vehicles numbers per fill point by number of fill points by KwH average per vehicle every fill point (250 km) by the cost of sufficient cells and batteries at each fill point (for just 10 years life). And vehicles are not all evenly spaced, so allow for many times that to cover a group of vehicles arriving at once....I imagine the capital outlay would be tens of million per roadhouse, perhaps a million dollars per year ongoing. To set up new roadhouses whose primary purpose would be just to sell electricity (there are just so many cokes, pies and spare tyres that vehicles and drivers consume every 250 km). The gross income from each car fill would be $11-15 at city prices, the profit a small fraction of that (obviously trucks would be more). So you might gross $5,000 per day from all the daily vehicles (about the same as the gross from filling less than 40 cars with petrol although profit to the retailer would be more than for petrol). I know this is rough as guts, but I am trying to judge order of magnitude. I am not going to go into business with one of those new roadhouses....
My point is not that it will never happen, but that it is far, far from feasible now, and no one wants to get an ulcer running that gauntlet. It will probably change with time as technology improves and demand increases but we are not there yet (last year there were a total of 50,000 Evs on Australia;s roads out of 19 million registered vehicles, almost none crossing the Nullarbor). Even in the city at present, 71% of the electricity that you put in your EV is generated by fossil fuel and our grid cannot handle the solar input, which is why we are only paid 5c per KwH for what homes export to the grid. Probably almost all across the Nullabor at present are hydrocarbon-generated. We need longer ranges per charge and better batteries, and I expect one day we will get them, but at the moment it is very much cart before the horse outside the cities - most of our highways, beef roads etc have nothing like the Nullabor traffic density.
The car dealers want to sell you expensive solar cars, the government wants you to think it is doing green things and the media is a parrot cage. They are not the ones who get stuck back of Bourke (no one can bring you a jerry of electricity). We need serious discussion of what is realistic -and safe for that matter..
My next little 2nd car runabout in the city will be an EV - but I will be keeping the hydrocarbon car for long trips, probably for the rest of my driving life. Governments (as in the ACT) are crazy to give dates now after which they will not permit the sale of anything except EVs.
With a price tag near double of it's fossil brother plus set up costs for charging, I'll stay a fossil and drive a fossil quite frankly as both price and lack of range together with charging times just makes it totally impractical for my world.
