There is a lot of wisdom and good political sense in Leigh Ewbamk's article. This is the way policy must move now. Coincidentally, his arguments are very similar to policies advocated in detail in my new book, 'Crunch Time: Using and Abusing Keynes to Fight the Twin Crises of our Era'[Scribe]. It's interesting how this happens - public ideas whose time has come are floated by different people at the same time. Thanks, Leigh - and I hope your piece and my book provoke positive thought and action.

One point- it is a bit naive to think the coal power lobby would not oppose a government focus on constructing a renewable energy based grid. The lobby does oppose it now, actively, as can be seen by the way the 'base load power problem' myth continues to keep popping up in public debate. But you are right that it would be harder for them to oppose a Keynesian renewable energy national grid construction project approach than to oppose complicated ETS financial engineering, which by now has its own large problems of credibility.

To criticise such a fluffy, well-meaning article would seem brutal. Why rob the author of all those beautiful dreams? So I'll just take exception to one item.
It says, "The backbone of a national renewable energy scheme will build new transmission lines that connect Australia’s population centres with our abundant renewable energy resources that are currently untapped."
Part of the problem with intermittent weather-dependent energy sources is that we do have to build such lines. Unlike transmission lines to nasty, fossil fuel plants, these have to be much longer to get to these remote sites and have to be built to high capacity, where that high capacity will only be used a fraction of the time. As has been noted before, its like building a super highway which, for most of the time, will host only a trickle of cars. The average output of wind towers, for example is only about one third of installed capacity, but the transmission lines have to be built to take the full capacity.
Building all those lines creates nasty emissions to, but perhaps I really souldn't spoil the author's beautiful dream

Oh dear... what a naive young fellow.

Leigh, fossil fuel interests don't "thwart development", they've been driving it for some 25 decades. Similarly the oil & gas industry has saved a lot more whales than Greenpeace (or didn't you know people hunted whales primarily as a source of lamp oil?).

If you'd studied real science instead of "Social Science Environment" you might have known that we do not have a precise expected mean temperature for this planet sufficient to determine whether it is currently warmer or cooler than anticipated. Nor do we know it's current absolute surface temperature with an accuracy to know whether the estimated +0.7K over the period 1750-2005 is real or not (don't take my word for it, search for "the elusive absolute surface temperature (SAT)" - it's a NASA-hosted Hansen Q&A).

Your adviser should have his/her butt kicked for allowing you to so dedicate yourself to such a dubious premise.

Please, try a real field before it's too late.

Okay, I'll add another spoiler. Adding large numbers of intermittent power sources won't affect the number of fossil fuel plants that have to be built a jot. This is why big energy really hasn't bother to oppose them, despite the fantasies of those in favour of those things. What it will do is alter the mixture of plants. Instead of more big coal and gas plants we will get more fast reaction gas plants to cope with the sudden changes in power supply from renewables. The real problem to be faced in integrating renwables on the grid will be to do so in way that actually saves on emissions. At the moment because of the amount of power the electricity grid has to keep in reserve to cope with changes in power supply from renwables, and the changes using a lot of those generators forces on the grid, there is a real question about how much intermittent sources save in emissions.

What an absolutely amazing idea, for anyone who is green (as in naive and immature).

Renewable energy is by and large so intermittent and unpredictable that it creates massive instabilities in the transmission network that have to be counter-acted in fractions of a second. How can we do this? Only with conventional power generating capability that is instantly switchable to full capacity.

Oh, you'd like geothermal energy from some remote location would you? No problem at all except for the massive costs of building and maintaining transmission lines (don't want more bushfires do we?) to a site of unknown longevity. Case in point - Iceland's Kraflur where an earthquake suddenly reduced the geothermal output to less than half. Who is to say that the fragmentation of rocks between two drilling points will not severely restrict the passage of water between them and render the drill holes useless for providing energy.

You'd like wind turbines? Okay, all very well if the wind blows but few turbines do any better than about 20% of the output that was touted and you have all those mechanical bits that need maintenance but are way up on those towers, not to mention the low-frequency noise like a pulsating jet engine on an aircraft and the birds that are killed.

Stick to what you know best - Social Science. I think the Environmental stuff is a big too much for you.

There are engineers, serving or retired, throughout australia's power generation industry who could rebut the dogmatic nonsense peddled here by three correspondents trying to mock leigh ewbank into silence. (obviously leigh ewbank has stung them into panic responses.)

here are a few fallacies exposed:

yes, solar and wind energy are variable , but there are many ways to compensate for that variability - combining them in a large diversified national grid. the sun is usually shining and the wind blowing somewhere in eastern or western australia, where we already have two very long-distance national grids in service.

the length and spread of powerlines in our present national grid is already huge - adding branch lines to new geothermal feeders in central australia is no big deal. as for bushfire danger - hello, where are most of the powerlines now? through our most heavily forested tableland areas, mostly. there is not much bush to burn in innamincka.

solar and wind technologies can be smoothed out by the inclusion of well tested and proven heat storage reverse cycle technologies eg in colorado 15% of the budgeted capital cost of new state-supported solar plants is for such technologies.

coal-fired power stations cannot be fired up instantly. they take several hours to fire up fully and are actually clumsy generators of power , unlike geothermal, reverse cycle heat storage or hydroelectric reverse cycle technologies which can be turned on literally at the flick of a switch.

also demand can be smoothed by smart grid demand regulating computer systems, for uses that can draw variable amounts of power e.g. for , heat bank storage heating or air conditioning, overnight recharge of electric car batteries, etc.

demand can also be regulated and smoothed by the incentive of variable tariffs, encouraging consumers to buy electricity when it is most abundant and cheaper, and vice versa. [end of part 1 -part 2 to follow.