The LGC subsidy at around $90 per Mwh for wind and commercial solar is roughly double the wholesale price of coal power. In 2014 when the subsidy was half that the RET Review found the cost of CO2 avoided was $59 per tonne of CO2. Carbon tax finished at $24.15 per tCO2. The RET is not a cost effective way of reducing emissions. It may or may not be extended after 2020. Given recent misgivings in SA it seems most unlikely to realise our Paris pledge. This is demonstrated dramatically by Germany which has had static emissions 2009-2015 (slight uptick in 2015) despite spending up to €25 bn per year in subsidies. Yet they still have a lot of coal and nuclear.

My guess is that electric cars with decent range will be charged off peak at home not so much by daytime solar. Batteries large or small that can make wind and solar dispatchable are still too expensive and collectively add up to just minutes worth of national electricity demand. If the cost or density breakthrough doesn't arrive it's back to reliable realtime generation.

The SA disaster and the 40% reliance on RE shows the screaming necessity of backup power, forever, irrespective of the rights or wrongs of RET targets. Targets are all very well, but the 2020 target of 50% reliance on RE still needs the backing of coal or nuclear. If we had the latter, it would obviate the need for the ugly, inefficient and costly renewable toys that the hysterics still believe will prevent climate "change".

Until these costly experiments prove beyond all doubt to be the foolishiness they really are, the banner should not be 'the need for renewable eletricity' but, 'the need for secure electricity'.

Now, on Bolt's blog. Frydenburg warns that Labor states' RET targets will cost $41 billion, with "another 4800 wind towers to wreck our views".

I think the time has come to move away from the silly false dichotomy of "coal vs renewables". The energy companies certainly have.

Changes in an industrial paradigm are always disruptive and often leave some people feeling left out or disadvantaged, but as technologies advance they are inevitable.

Taswegian, I don't think you're considering all the implications of an autonomous electric vehicle fleet. For example, why would you own a car if you can have one at the door within a couple of minutes at very low cost? A major cost of ownership of a car is depreciation: I have a BMW E32 7 series that cost about $120k new in 1992. I bought it in 2009 for $3500 and it would have been much the same price for at least 5 years It's an extreme example, but a similar phenomenon is true for all cars. Why not spread that cost around among a lot of people?

An autonomous vehicle fleet allows for centralised charging facilities among other benefits and it will undoubtedly be a key part of making renewables viable as the primary generation source.

There are many other technologies coming on stream over the next few years, as the author points out. I have a personal interest in the field informed by some technical background and I'm surprised almost daily by news of some technological advance.

Sure, we can't rush headlong into a future we can't predict, some conservatism is necessary, but we can't let that slip into neo-Luddite stagnation.

Agree with most of this if the term renewable is replaced with carbon free alternative! Mr turnbull is not the only one dancin to the tune of Ideological imperatives of those who can only say renewable! And endlessly repeat loudly with fingers stuffed in ears!

Look, we have clean safe cheap thorium, fifties technology rejected because there's no weapons spin off! Its fertile not fissile and consequently the limited reaction cannot produce plutonium or make a bomb.

Thorium doesn't need to be enriched and is used as is! And is less radioactive than a banana!

Used in molten salt reactors, it lends itself to the safe disposal of current stores of nuclear waste products and preferentially the most toxic!

Which goes around and around through the cycle giving up valuable energy each time inside a system that is walk away safe, to finally reduce the remnant half life to just 300 years! Which others will pay us billions to store/recycle!

As the cycle goes around and around enormously valuable medical isotopes are easily removed! And suddenly incurable cancers become curable! fact not theory!

If I were to step outside my door and dig up around one cubic metre of topsoil, I'd recover around 3 MM's of thorium. Recovery and refining costs could be contained to around $100.00? And that's enough thorium to power your house and car for the next 100 years!

Do the maths, that's just a dollar a year!

Apart from SAFELY burning nuclear waste, molten technology is capable of combining Co2 and hydrogen, harvested from seawater into useful hydrocarbons, fact not theory!

And as the Co2 is removed, and given the affinity Co2 has with water, atmospheric Co2 is literally sucked from the sky to more or less replace what's been removed!

We have enough thorium in the ground to power the entire world for thousand years and that's before we need to start mining rock and crushed it to power the world for thousands more! Both the government and the renewable devotees need frank fearless advice that comes direct and unfiltered!
Alan B.

I expected to be attacked from both sides of this debate by the four trillion a year fossil fuel industry, whose returns would be seriously reduced by the rollout of this technology, and by renewable devotees for a variety of reasons, some ideological and only possible because of an unfounded and outdated fear of the word nuclear, which is invariably accompanied in their mind's eye by doom and gloom mushroom shaped clouds and stories of chernobyl and fukushima?

Simply put, if walk away safe molten salt technology had been the reactors in use in the latter examples? They would still be beavering away serving the need of their respective countries!

Walk away safe molten salt reactors and thorium could be built here and in the next five years! Sure, we'd need to import some expertise! But when has that ever been difficult!

Excuses, recalcitrant political intransigence anyone?

And we need to do it before the Chinese come waving IP's for technology that the west abandoned several decades ago! Control the world's energy and price structure and you effectively control or ruin the world!

Let me conclude by adding, if you combine cheap clean safe energy with new deionization desalination, which produces 95% potable water from salt water for around quarter of the price of previous desalination utilizing today's technology!

However, if you then use energy that could be made available to the average household for a dollar a year! The sky's the limit for any nation that has marginal riparian access to seawater and even higher than that by any country lucky enough to be surrounded by it!

If you need to validate my claims, get on U tube and listen to some highly credentialed experts far more knowledgeable than me, on this and allied topics!

Or attack me and everything I've posted, along with my atrocious Grammar; ruthlessly, in some sort of forlorn hope of preventing others doing their own validations, or demanding change we can all believe in!?
Alan B.