Fickle Pickle - depreciation is most emphatically not the book keeping name for repayments. Where do you get this stuff from? Its a cost which does not affect cash flow, until you have to find money to replace the capital items.
Yes, you do have to revamp the network. You have to put in more load following open cycle gas turbines, among other changes.. and the reserve requirements do increase. The green case is that the reserve requirements are small, but there is evidence that they completely wipe out any savings in carbon.
As for the rest of your post basically you seem to be hoping that capital will arrive of its own accord with a few, simple changes to the financial system. Well it won't. Supply and demand of capital follows laws far more fundamental than anything in science and you mess with them at your peril.
Wind systems represent a vast additional cost for no real gain, and no amount of fast talking and redefining accounting terms is going to alter that. Leave it with you..

Ozandy
"As for the feasibility of renewables...until fossil fuels are not taxpayer subsidised we cannot compare apples with apples. They get tax breaks for exploration, extraction, transport and distribution. Being vertically integrated, most fossil fuels are now competition free zones where profits can be moved within the industry stack to where taxation is minimised and profits maximised."

That is so true.

It's interesting to do the thought experiment of wondering what would have happened in the 20th century if the state had not subsidised fossil fuels. Decentralised alternative energy forms - like solar, wind, etc. - would have been more economical, and would have been developed with the capital that the state diverted into its coal-fired power stations. We might now be at the stage where each house provided its own sustainable energy, with the trillions of dollars the know-it-all state snaffled.

Taxpayer subsidisation of energy should ideally be abolished. The restrainer is the great social dislocation since entire industries, and all the jobs and families they support, have grown up around these subsidies. This teaches us yet again that these kinds of interventions to subsidise uneconomic activity set up serious intractable social problems that are very difficult to reverse.

Was there a need for government to take on itself the task of decreeing coal-fired power in the first place? No! If power stations needed subsidies, they were uneconomical, and the population's scarce resources should not have been confiscated to pay for them.

The irony of it is that the people now urging the government to dictate energy policy, and subsidise uneconomical sources, are the same people who declare that doing so has produced the biggest moral mistake in the history of the world!

What makes anyone think the know-it-all state knows any better now than it did when it caused the problem?

FP
"So yes we will be doing it and yes it does require no policy response. It can and will be done without the need to involve government policy..."

I think that's great and wish you all the best - without taxpayer funds.

These forums are a fascinating examination in psychology. Not surprisingly some comments were positive towards the article, and some negative.
What was very surprising was the fact that virtually no one commenting actually addressed the moral point raised at the core of the piece.
Instead contributors seem to largely address their own agendas, most of which were of the strategic view that the best form of defence is attack, and that if evidence is presented contrary to their opinion then it must be dismissed - I was particularly impressed with the comment by one "Who knows why Science Daily said that, but it's quite wrong." Yes why would one of the foremost scientific journals publish such slander to the cause at such a prominent time as just before midnight on New Years Eve?
On the plus side it makes a nice change not to be accused of being in the pay of the oil companies (I'm not by the way). Perhaps there is a fear of that accusation being countered by "Are you in the pay of Goldman Sachs & friends then?"
As the quote from Dr Rancourt concludes "Actually address the question; otherwise you are weakening your effect as an activist."

James,

"What was very surprising was the fact that virtually no one commenting actually addressed the moral point raised at the core of the piece."

I believe I did - have I missed anything?

My apologies Yuyutsu. You were one of the very few who addressed the key point of the piece. - JF

James the moral point - unless I am mistaken - is that the author maintains that it is going to cost a lot of money to reduce green houses gases and that this money is better spent doing other things. The author says that we are not certain about the effect of ghg emissions and until we are we should not increase the price of energy.

What I am pointing out is there is no moral dilemma as it can cost us less to reduce green house gases by generating energy with renewable energy without increasing the price of energy. This can be achieved by advancing credit to those who will invest in ways of reducing green house gas emissions.

Economists and the general population believe that the only way to create credit is to mortgage existing assets. There are other sound economic ways to create credit without mortgaging assets.

The moral debate we could be having is not whether we should be investing in renewables but whether those with assets are the only ones in society to whom we advance credit.