Whatever you might or might not think of climate science there is no chance of renewables taking on the lions share of electricity generation, with this article full of the misleading nonsense usually peddled by renewables advocates.

Firstly, it says that prices for electricity generated by renewables is falling. That is true but beside the point. The per-unit produced cost may be falling but that never takes into account capacity factor(average output - a sort of measure of how much conventional capacity it replaces). The truth is that most renewables that the author talks about are simply add ons to the conventional network with no possiblity of replacing it. Their use in large quantities in a comparatively small, isolated grid such as Aus would cause major problems. Countries like Denmark can do it because its part of a very dense network and it can store power in dams in Norway, for example.

This business about renewables taking up the bulk of new investment is because demand stalled during the GFC and hasn't recovered, and probably because China is loopy about building dams. Renewables are the result of green legislation, and that's it..

Hi Curmudgeon,
Thank you for your comments which, I feel, reflect the primitive state of the early renewable sources of energy currently around us. At the start of the 20th century, very few people cared for the heavy, inefficient and noisy internal combustion engines compared to the then market leading steam and electric cars. Only a brave or far-sighted person would have predicted that steam and electric cars would be driven off the market within 20-30 years.
I have hope that technological development will produce a variety of efficient and low-cost renewable energy sources so that our society will not have to flirt with atomic energy and can minmise all fossil fuel usage.
Coal is too valuable as a chemical engineering feedstock to waste it just to generate power when its products can do everything that oil and gas have done for us in the way of plastics, drugs and carbon based substances used in every life.
Thank you for starting this discussion in such a pleasant way: I hope it will continue in the same vein.

The UN report did not favour only renewables such as wind, solar and hydro, it also specifically included nuclear power in the group.

It disappoints me greatly to see reports such as the IPCC reports cherry-picked and misquoted by those with a "renewables only or bust" barrow to push.

All available options to avoid damaging climate change must be considered on the their merits. Articles such as this are simply sales blurb for, at best, a partial solution.

Maybe, given the need for reliability and availability, the true thrust of this article is to plan to fail - in which case fossil fuels will fill the gap, to the almost immediate (in geological timescales) detriment of the planet which we inhabit, our only home.

Closer to home, in Eastern Australia, the percentage of renewable energy on the grid has decreased from 17% to 7% during the past few decades. The 17% figure was achieved primarily through the Snowy Mountains Authority's plant. We have run out of opportunities of that scale.

Despite all of the solar and wind effort, we need not only to get back to the former 17% of zero carbon electricity, but to double it and then double that again. That means 10 or 12 times the current figure.

Wind+solar on that scale is serious stuff, as Germany is discovering and this article mentioned. I can't see it happening by, say, 2050, and I write this as one who has been involved with several large solar thermal projects and who previously held great hope and faith in the ability of wind+solar to be the low cost distributed power sources of the future.

Even Germany is doing too little, too late. What comes next?

What an appropriate question and what a time to post on "Online Opinion" the latest news from the Climate News Network that solar energy is now available 24 hours per day.

http://climatenewsnetwork.us6.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=6e13c74c17ec527c4be72d64f&id=73a8ce1461&e=b500daf449

Brian of Buderim

go back and look at the article you've linked to.. note how it says 18 hours of the day and for "many" months 24 hours.. what does "many" months mean? Now look at the actual rated capacity.. 20 MW .. a large, conventional plant is typically 500 MW. Note that the article doesn't say anything about costs or capacity factor so its impossible to properly evaluate that plant. and its taken them decades to get to this point.

Now check out its location. From memory that plant is in Alpine desert, of which we don't have a large supply in Australia (in fact, none).

All that aside I have seen proposals for all-renewable networks in Aus which might be feasible, if they ever manage to scale up that Spanish plant to anything like reasonable size, and they are able to invent something called power bio-diesels on the scale required (also provided we don't eat as all our crop land will be required to grow food for the bio-diesel). Costs will be prohibitive

Forget renewables. If you want to get rid of emissions, nuclear is far more of an option.