The Oil Drum

You may be unfamiliar with the fact that the "few hundred dollars worth of PV panels" you refer to don't work "overnight" and, even if you work the night shift, wouldn't get you very far, (unless, of course you, were good a pumping your scooter with your free foot against the pavement).

It would also be helpful if you were going downhill.

Using the figures from 2003-4 at the ABS, we see that
+15,690PJ is produced in Australia
+1,295PJ is imported (mostly sweet crude oil refined products)
-11,759PJ is exported (uranium and black coal, and our own sour crude unrefined)

leaving 5,346PJ to use domestically, of which
-1,035PJ is used directly
-4,311PJ is converted into some other form (coal into electricity, refined oil products into plastics, etc)

Of those 4,311PJ converted,
1,801PJ are lost in the conversion, transmission and distribution processes,
giving 2,510PJ of products

and thus 3,545PJ of actual end use of primary and derived energy.

Now looking at this, we see that of 2,875.1PJ used in 2001 (earlier year than above, thus lower energy consumption), the forms it was used in finally were,
Petroleum products, 53.2%
Biofuels, under 1%
Natural and town gas, 22.6%
Electricity, 24%
Solar, under 1% (they mean solar hot water heaters)

Note however that "electricity" is not an energy source, but an energy carrier. Its source in Australia is overwhelmingly from coal, as noted here; about 50% of electricity comes from black coal, 31% from brown coal, and 10.6% from natural gas; the remainder of 8.4% is renewable, mostly hydro. So we can rearrange the table above like so,

Petroleum products, 53.2%
Biofuels, under 1%
Natural and town gas, 25%
Black & brown coal, 19.4%
Hydro &c, 2%
Solar, under 1%

Note however that the petroleum products are used overwhelmingly for transport. Of 1,530PJ of the energy got from petroleum products, 1,166.4PJ were used in road, rail, air or water-borne transport. They used only 8.4PJ of other kinds of energy.

Transport enables most of the other forms of energy consumption and production. It's hard to imagine mining, agriculture, or even construction without transport.

You're quite right that personal transport faces few technical difficulties; but it faces many psychological and social difficulties. Your average accountant or labourer is not going to hop on an electric scooter if they have any choice.

There are other technical issues, though. If we want to give up oil and replace it with electrical things, then we have to give up coal and gas, too. That's because electrical transport would be an extra burden on the power grid, and our power comes from coal, gas and hydro. Even if we assume that coal and gas are infinite, climate change effects will continue to give Australia a water shortage, which is already impacting power generation.

So, turning to electrical transport means we'd have to expand renewable energy. I'm quite happy about that, I'm just pointing it out as an issue. "Just add power packs to your bikes!" sounds simple, but is less simple when we say, "oh and build more wind turbines."

Let's also not forget freighting, the non-personal transport. The key to what we call "our way of life" isn't just beign able to hop in the car to go to the shops, but also at those shops to have products from many thousand of kilometres away. Freight transport faces technical difficulties, too. Electric trucking doesn't appear to be practical as yet, though rail of course works marvellously, it's not quick to build, and faces many political difficulties despite its obvious utility.

Here's a reference to an excellent article suggesting that the energy payback time on PV production is surprisingly long (decades under some scenarios).

http://www.peakoil.org.au/news/energy_profit.htm