MattWright - you've picked an extremely bad example to make your point. The reason there are so many alternate energy projects in Spain, and they can get funding, is that they are very heavily subsidised.

I saw one estimate that wind farms they are paid about three times the going rate for their power, and PV projects eight times or some such. and none of that takes into account the need to build additional transmission towers and back-up power plants.

Nor are any of the Spanish solar pilot plants, which they trumpet, count as truly base load, although they aspire to be..

The problem with this article is that it assumes people are going to be absorbing their energy through a centralized provider generating it from a single site, instead of purchasing their own units and installing them on their own (of which both PV solar AND wind are available).

With the alternative in mind, people actually buying these devices and living off them as much as they can and excess grid power to a minimum, THEIR affluence would go up considerably- considering how much we are ripped off by electricity companies these days by every monthly bill.

Thanks Ted Trainer,
finally someone out there who speaks my language!
I shall read your link http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/ with great interest.
The real problem though is halting the current insanity; I'll be interested to see if you have a plan for that. Creating a sustainable economy is eminently doable; stopping this runaway train is the hard part!

*finally someone out there who speaks my language!*

Ah Squeers, finally there are two of you!

Now a little problem. Today another 250'000 mouths were added to
the human population. Tomorrow the same will happen. The day
after that too. etc.

Yabby,

if you look at some of the material in this article's links, those questions are addressed. I've never said it's going to be easy!
It's unambiguously stated here, for instance: http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/TheTransitionProcess.html
that "There is no possibility of significant structural change in the near future", and that "There will be no significant change while the supermarket shelves remain well stocked".
I think this is absolutely correct. More and more people are discontented with consumerism and are starting to get nervous about the hysterical pitch of bailouts, stimulous spending, the mania for economic growth etc. It's crazy! Yet the ideology overall will hold until the cracks widen. (I'm listening to RN on the IMF hegemon while I write this).
We're going to have to wait for the train to derail or run out of track, but that there's no doubt in my mind it will.

In the meantime, Yabby, you can just label people like me "alarmists".
But I'm not alarmed; I want the whole damn thing to collapse, hopefully in a way that we can salvage sustainable lives.

Spain is a great example. And paying 3x the prevailing rate for wind derived power (in Australia we pay about 2x) is a good deal.

Because they're only doing that for the first 10 or 20Gigawatts and then the price comes down towards parity with conventional coal and gas CCGT

The beauty of it is the fuel cost is fixed for ever. Whereas with coal, gas an uranium the fuel price is going up and up in the short-mid term.

The world needs a fixed cost of energy and renewables are providing that and with each 1000MW of Wind or PV installed globally the price drops for the next 1000MW - that's where the advantage of government investments in the technology comes in.