I doubt Finkel will be implemented any time soon as there will be not only winners but losers who will complain loudly. Power bills will keep rising due to high priced gas, generous renewables subsidies and featherbedded network owners. The next coal station is not due to close until 2022.

Meanwhile I think summers will get hotter if the persistent blocking high pressure system becomes a recurring weather feature. We may in effect have to ration electricity and water by rolling restrictions. Greens will be happy as we won't have that awful nuclear power.

One of Finkel's concepts is that intermittent generators should have firm capacity or energy storage. The Hornsdale wind farm in SA will pioneer this with a battery. The problem is if it's dead calm for several days the battery won't recharge in time. Finkel wants this everywhere so it may be back to the drawing board if it doesn't work out.

Yes Tassie, this one sided, oil, gas and coal friendly essay, completely overlooks, the elephant in the room! Nuclear energy! Not just nuclear energy in general but, cheaper than coal, walk away safe, thorium energy!

With just regulations preventing its roll out! Those regulations the product of our alleged political representatives!? And nobody else?

Thorium is the most energy dense material on the planet! Why just 8 grams of the stuff would run my house and car for the next 100 years nonstop without refueling or enrichment?

I could step outside my door, your door or his door and fill a one cubic metre box with dirt. Then using simple gravity separation, separate out the thorium content, which would likely be around 8 grams and at an estimated cost of just $100.00!

Do the sums, that's just a dollar a year! And the only real reason our alleged representatives are using every trick in the political handbook to prevent it ever seeing the light of day!?

Regardless of the fact it promises all that fusion promised but couldn't deliver! And as an enduring, clean, safe, source of carbon free power, is both a super fuel and green energy!

A handful of Mumbai beach sand would supply India's entire power needs for a year! Moreover, no impoverished Indian villager is hardly likely to be deprived of power that could cost just $1.00 year?

Required reading. Thorium in four minutes and Super Fuel, sub titled green energy.

Total time required? Around fifteen minutes!

Optional, a documentary giving a blow by blow description of the assembly, materials and operation between the 50's and 70's of the walk away safe, Oak Ridge thorium reactor.

That was successfully trialled without incident during those decades and arguably only shut down by a corrupt Nixon?

Starved in infancy for lack of funding, and the fact it just didn't have a weapons spin off!
Alan B.

Works for One Notion Senator Roberts,AKA Pauline's Hansons mobile Ponzi scheme & gets published as a critique of Finkel,you should really open a comedy section where all the political Ponzi scheme party announcements can be placed.
One Notion AKA Liberal extreme Right Wing,even worse than the other fool Abbott,I doubt any of them have had an original idea in their lives,the thing I find strange is there are actual humans who believe this rubbish,because it is rubbish

For the technically minded.

Type in, the case for thorium, into your search engine, then scroll down the page to a comprehensive PDF, with an impressive scientific who's who in the biblical/index.

And prepared for a Brazilian government not in bed with foreign investors/American investors, and consequently free to go their own way!?

The PDF also contains a colour coded schematic of a 230 MW molten salt reactor.

It'd be a travesty that those we compete with for markets, beat us to the draw with vastly cheaper, clean green energy.

And then used it to produce steel from mountainous iron ore, then outbid us in our traditional steel markets, not the least of which is domestic! And where we invented the one step, electric arc furnace, steel smelting process!

And based on the fact, where lightning strikes the ground fusing the struck material. It produces for a split second, heat hotter than the centre of the sun!?

And given away, I believe, by Chip Goodyear? One time fully imported American CEO of steel maker, Bluescope Metal? And given it wasn't his, I believe, to legally gift, should be legally retrieved, as illegally purloined intellectual property!

Without question this nation suffers as a consequence, I believe, of lack of scientific acumen at the helm?

And currently occupied instead, I believe, by ideologically driven, power consumed, coal fired, Troglodytes or worse, knuckle dragging, knuckle head Netherlanders, merely masquerading as conservatives?

Arguably, only the removal of both major parties or incumbents, will resulting meaningful change we can all believe in? Or grudgingly accept as best practice, preferably while we retain a modicum of economic sovereignty!

And very doable by the dual simplicity of actually getting out to vote then putting the incumbent and their preference partners last and or down near the bottom of the list on the ballot paper!

But only if you want a change of direction or meaningful change we can all believe in!
Alan B.

Fake economics? And arguably describes the policies of those we elect by default! As being the lessor of two evils? Not ever on merit, nor the power of persuasive argument, but by them presenting as less incompetent or incorrigible, than those currently holding the reins of power?

Thus we have a tax system, arguably the most complex ever invented, filled with entirely unnecessary, man made complexity we are almost universally obliged to pay some bookworm, at considerable and unnecessary cost to us, to unravel all while an underfunded budget goes even further into the never never!

We pay a 30% premium on just about everything and our energy supply is just about the dearest/least affordable anywhere.

Ditto housing, where the great Australian dream of owning your own home has morphed into the great Australian dream of owning someone else's home? We along with the major part of our economic sovereignty has been sold down the river!

Thus we have a (abracadabra) disappearing before your very eyes, manufacturing sector with those policies that could not just save it but built anew as greater than ever, studiously avoidedstrenuously resisted!

There's talk of innovation and new ideas by fakers and pretenders!

But never ever accompanying bold decisive action!

We have freehold land that is anything but, but as, in fee simple, perpetual leases. So we just don't have real land rights, nor is a man's home his castle!

Given if that were so, we'd arguably have sovereign right to defend it or sovereign rights over the land we stand on, or farm, as alleged freehold?

Try denying miners with deep deep pockets or the path a road or rail takes to understand what I mean. Unless an election hinges on the outcome!

Fake economics? Both major parties are full of it and all they really really care about is winning office and keeping the other tribe out!

And if that results in massive underfunded promises and energy prices the horror of the world? So be it!
Alan B.