Channel 6

Taxation & Registration Issues

Written 20 September 2009

Home Power Generation & Plug In (100%) Electric Vehicles

Over the past few weeks the motoring press has written extensively on the subject of the "coming of the 100% Electric (Battery) vehicle.

Concurrently a fair bit of media attention & advertising is on the subject of "the benefits of generating your own power AND selling the surplus back to the power company". An admirable target, in my view. Cannot understand why there is not a HUGE push to make this as attractive & admirable as water saving.

Bringing these two subjects together leads me to ask the following question:-

Just supposing I am my fictitious family as set out in the "Future" page comes about. Straight away I have difficulty believing government (state and/or federal) will happily allow my family to:

a) Go motoring "for free". In other words if I generate all the power I need to run all my vehicles the federal government will miss out on the huge, indeed gargantuan, amounts of monies pouring into the Treasury coffers from petrol, diesel & LPG.

I cannot accept the government can afford, in the monetary sense, to miss out on these dollars. Initially, yes - but let's go to 2020 and project that 25% of city vehicles will be PIES (Plug In Electrics). I'll not try to project the maths as it is so obvious mega money is involved.

b) Tax i.e. Income tax. Will the Tax Office just ignore the fact I may be (for example) generating a gross "extra" income of $2000 p.a. from my home power station? I just cannot see any Federal Treasurer accept just by-passing this issue and not wish to have a decent slice of the Pie (no pun intended). More so when the drop in petrol/diesel taxation revenue, in all forms, begins to drop significantly - or even if the usual annual growth of this revenue begins to lessen.

But just suppose the "surplus" electricity is taxable. Then I become something of a small business and can therefore claim deperciation etc etc etc and what all this means both foe me & the Tax Office. I see Legislation, Court Cases, Paperwork, GST, ABN's and god knows what else. A complete dog's breakfast.

 

 

 

 

 

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