SM. If it is so cheap, why does it still require subsidies?
Also, when coal (or gas) is burned it is used to heat water, which becomes steam, which drives turbines. The latent heat of evaporation and condensation are essential ingredients in how heat becomes electricity. So no, the coal exhaust does not strip turbines as it gets nowhere near them! Coal has been *extensively* researched for over 100 years...yes it is indeed near the end of it's innovation cycle! Renewables however, even in a hostile financial environment are becoming more viable every year.
When one accuses other's of ignorance it pays to be somewhat accurate.
Now some facts:
"Clean coal" is a marketing myth and can never be viable. Solar thermal is already cheaper.
Coal requires massive infrastructure: mining, transport, Generation and transport of power. Existing businesses are profitable because they only have to maintain the infrastructure...not build from scratch.
That infrastructure was subsidised heavily by governments as "nation building" exercises. (exactly the sort of spending the profiteers like to deride in political circles these days).
As the article states, the coal industry is spending up big to mis-inform the public (more anti-science), buy politicians and generally use warfare methods to remain a large part of the economy...not by becoming more efficient or by paying the costs that they currently pass off to the rest of society.
In short "Value" is benefits minus costs. The coal industry is overstating their benefits and denying the real costs. Of course they do, it's their job! What is sad is that politicians, respecting power above all else, are allowing them to screw us all so easily.

Ozandy says:

"When one accuses other's of ignorance it pays to be somewhat accurate."

Indeed it does. It seems Ozandy is talking past Shadow Minister in saying:

"... when coal (or gas) is burned it is used
to heat water, which becomes steam, which
drives turbines. The latent heat of evaporation
and condensation are essential ingredients in
how heat becomes electricity. So no, the coal
exhaust does not strip turbines as it gets
nowhere near them!"

SM made the point that, using his own words, "to say that coal is in an innovation dead end is pure ignorance", in contradiction to a concluding assertion of the article that:

"In the long run, of course, the coal industry
is doomed. No amount of lobbying or political
power can save them from the fact that coal
is on the wrong side of the innovation curve."

SM highlighted the innovative prospect of pulverised coal being used directly as a GAS turbine fuel, and with that highlighting also pointed out with commendable honesty a recognised hurdle to that prospect becoming a reality. His point was that innovation in respect to coal is continuing. One innovation developed in Australia already promises to overcome this particulates erosion problem, and that is underground coal gasification (UCG). The mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen produced (synthesis gas) is capable of either being burned as a gas turbine fuel, or being used as a feedstock for liquid hydrocarbon synthesis, or some combination of the two.

This is exactly what Linc Energy is in the process of developing with a stranded coal deposit in the Walloway Basin in SA.

It is true that coal has conventionally been used as Ozandy says, "to heat water, which becomes steam, which drives [steam] turbines". Whether the cost effectiveness of synthesis gas from UCG is greater than that of natural gas generating electricity via a gas turbine, I do not know. It just seemed a pity for two good posts to be at cross purposes.

The article's payload is the unchallenged assertion that coal interests are 'big', in comparison to those of oil.

The problems that will come with failure to cut back GHG emissions have more than enough mainstream science behind them. The problems with developing real and effective policy to deal with it are the failures of mainstream party politics; mainstream politics should have been active on this but they've been giving us greenwash at best and denial, doubt and delay at worst. In actuality they're giving us a combination of these.

The less than ideal solutions put up by green idealists are not the reason policy to date has been so pathetically inadequate, it's the compromised-beyond-effective pretend policies, aimed at feel-good deflection of public concern that are stock in trade of (within Australia) Labor and the blinkered and blunt refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the issues of Liberals and Nationals that are the reason for failure to date.

Real mainstream policy in Australia is to expand and exploit exportable fossil fuel resources at the maximum rate possible - before the boom comes down. And the prospects of an adversely affected world looking for nations and governments besides their own to blame for those impacts are completely passed over. Australia's role as profiteers in producing global warming will come back to bite us.

Thanks spindoc.

I think what Ken and all the other idealists completely misunderstand is the level of support for green policies that significantly affect the average person/familiy standard of living. There's support for feel good green policies which won't cost too many jobs, but not for the kind of fundamental changes the green movement want.

The reason that the recent bank interest rate increases have caused so much trouble is because they affects the very stretched bottom line of the average australian household. The idea that a political party could do away with coal revenue ( which underpins the current level of prosperity ) and increase costs by introducing ridiculously expensive, boutique technologies to produce electricity is laughable.

"Real, mainstream philsophy to export as much coal and iron ore as possible" is almost universally supported outside of the southern capital cities. And the only reason there isn't higher support there is becasue they don't undertand that the reason they still all have their good jobs is because of the money mining brings in. Without mining Australia would be worse off than Greece.