Tristan,

Yours is a brilliant, sane article - backed by research - that deals with the facts of what is needed to maintain a healthy and sustainable energy grid in Australia.

You opened my eyes to information about countries and provinces where certain fuels are working or failing.

I need to hear more of your balanced research on climate change and what is the way forward for Australia.

Should the new government promote clean-coal, gas and nuclear power generation as renewables alone will not meet the demands of the energy grid?

This is an interesting article about Australia's energy policies and the misinformation frequently spread about fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear power.

One thing that obvious is that Australia has a large and dry landmass, where solar farms could be scattered so that if there is cloud cover in one area there would be a number of places where the sun is still shining. Let us build redundancy into out PV grid: when the grid is delivering all the energy it can, let us divert some of that energy into electrolytically splitting water into oxygen, vented to the atmosphere, and Hydrogen which can be stored and used somewhere else at some other time.

Having solar PV farms close to the eastern coast, some in the middle of the continent, and some more close to the western coast means that we can capture solar energy for a longer period each day.

Tristan:
Suggest that people aspire to have electricity is to completely misrepresent the issue! If you yourself was one of those folk that live in a household with no washing machine and you yourself were tasked with the entire families laundry needs!?

This essay wouldn't look like just another academic dissertation from the lofty heights of some far distant ivory tower! And just so out of touch to be intensely offensive!

Which is so typical of left-leaning environmentalists who clearly live in a bubble world of their own and completely out of touch with reality! ASPIRE!! Which is used by folk just like you to replace the word NEED in your DISASSOCIATED INDIFFERENT vocabulary!

Moreover, most green commentators ignore the real solution to climate change is a carbon-free nuclear power. Conflate it with nuclear bombs and nuclear destruction! Because you have no real understanding of it and how we can very safely use it even in our very own backyards!

Here I am referring to MSR thorium And burning up the world's stockpile of nuclear waste to reduce the half-life to just 300 years and power the entire world for at least a thousand years as we do so.

Left to the anti-nuclear diotic idealogues who inhabit the extreme left of domestic politics, we are left with no other option for ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL BASE LOAD POWER THAN COAL!

Do you even comprehend or take responsibility for what you are actually responsible for, i.e., the current climate change and energy policies!

By the sheer simplicity of demanding absolute purity and totally unaffordable solutions that come with their share of toxic pollution!

All one can add as an indictment on this sort of article is, BAH HUMBUG!
Alan B.

Renewable energy targets or portfolio standards are an expensive and inadequate way to attack emissions. That has been confirmed for a decade most recently in the US with the study by Greenstone and Nath. It found that the cost of CO2 avoided by US state standards was $130 per Mwh
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3374942
Contrast that to the $54 found Australia's 2014 RET Review.

Firstly here there are the direct subsidies such as feed-in tariffs, LGCs and STCs and government grants. Then there are indirect costs such as frequency correction. line losses and congestion for remote generators then the fuel premium for balancing by open cycle gas balancing and fast ramped coal. In future battery storage could add say $100 per Mwh. Instead of a subsidy wind and commercial solar plants should pay all these costs.

The German federal audit office recently concluded that carbon pricing would be more effective than renewable subsidies. That would give nuclear a look in with combined cycle gas and pumped hydro. The public is in thrall to 100% renewables but doesn't grasp the real costs.

Similar thinking should be applied to our capture of wind power. I see the tall, horizontal axis wind turbines as being the first stage of wind turbine design. Holidaying in Stanley I noticed two things: one was that it was always windy and the second was that one house in every three had a roof-mounted vertical axis wind turbine.

In many ways, the state of development of renewables parallels that of the internal combustion engine in the period 1880-1910. Expensive, high-maintenance, and relatively low efficiency but capable of considerable development so the cost per unit of power delivered gets smaller and smaller. Again, with wind farms widely scattered the problem of the wind not blowing in any one place vanishes when it is realised that the wind is blowing in other places.

When it comes to looking at better ways to handle human excrement than flushing it all out to sea, and committing three environmental crimes at one go*, it was proved some 40 years ago that a sealed anaerobic septic tank could produce large quantities of methane. Just as with Hydrogen, this methane could be stored for use elsewhere at a different time, if more was produced than was needed.

* 3 environmental crimes are (1)wasting a perfectly good fertiliser, (2)using drinking water to flush it away, and (3)polluting the ocean with our high nitrogen wastes.

I am reserving my fourth post to rebut any sensible comments: any shrill, personal comments I will ignore!