The sort of comments on this articles are indicative of Australian syndrome- very poor understanding of climate emergency. Get off the football/cricket/beer/ tv entertainment and start working the grey matter.

'The wind doesn't blow all the time, the sun doesn't shine all the time' Like where? Wind farms are springing up everywhere, along coastlines and windy areas allover the planet. South Australia is sitting on a goldmine with the Eyre peninsula. The wind never stops. All countries where the political leaders aren't brain dead are embracing and transitioning to zero carbon renewable energy.Germany will be close to zero emissions within ten years. Even in countries where the political leaders, mostly men, are brain dead, have begun a transition. Many states in the US of A are getting into wind and hydro-electric, mainly along the Atlantic seaboard. There are many web sites just google and the general program is called the Big Restart. Washington is doing nothing but adding hot air, but the legislatures are starting to work it out that transitioning to zero carbon is actually an economic and industrial opportunity. The owners of the coal mines and gas lease dont want the people everywhere to start doing the math. Coal, gas, nuclear all enjoy enormous subsidies from the taxpayers. I was not shocked to see the so called geo thermal ( i suspect they are fracters) get billions of subsidy from the carbon tax package. The ALP govt really should employ someone who can add up. The problem in Australia is a mindset of deferring to others to think for us. This is is why Big Coal,a villain if ever there was one,can get away with scare campaigns,outright propaganda and untruths. For example, this carbon capture con. Snake oil for sure.

The main factor in favour of wind power is its cost. For example, Infigen Energy was quoted in the AFR stating that it needed a wholesale price of $100 to $110 per megawatt hour (including RECs) to make it viable. This is about a quarter of the cost of solar photo-voltaic.

Wind power generators are also readily available. All you need is money for construction and the right site.

Wind power is also a good match for off-peak electric storage heaters because the utility decides when to turn on the power and it fits in with the erratic nature of wind generated electricity. Unfortunately the government is planning to phase out these water heaters.

Mark Lawson here

Hestia
The main reason wind farms are spinging up is because of government subsidies. It has nothing to do with the viability of wind as such. You mention the Eyre penninsula as a windy spot. I'm sure it is, but somehow this never seems to work out to wind being reliable. One point to note is that wind farms stop producing if the wind is too strong, for various reasons, as well as if its too weak.

Wattle
The off peak stuff sounds attractive, the problem is that the off-peak load is often taken by conventional plants that the operators don't dare shut down because they take too long to restart, and don't want to throttle back as that makes them too inefficient (both in cost and emissions).
Also, although wind power is the cheapest form of alternative energy, as the article notes, any capacity built is a straight addition to conventional capacity. It won't replace any of it. Get rid of all the wind farms and consumers would never know the differnce. In other words they are a big increase in costs, just to save carbon.

Ammonite
Consumers have previously been mislead by the emphasis on wind as some sort of solution to the carbon problem. The business about using a diverse range of alternative energy systems opens a whole new can of worms. As far as I know it hasn't been tried on a large scale, and on a small scale has proved thoroughly unstatisfactory (see one of the earlier posters), and that's with battery backup. Photovolatic is far more expensive, and proably more unreliable. Wave power is more reliable but very expensive. Perhaps you could find someone who knows how this mythical base load alternative energy grid would work in practice, and at what cost?

Any time you get someone talking about needing a "MIX" of something, in this case power generation, you know that their favoured method is uncompetitive with mainstream techniques.

We know that in Oz, & most other places, coal fired is the cheapest & most reliable form of electricity generation.

How can anyone suggest that we should tax ourselves to force us not to use coal, but should dig the stuff up, & ship it to china, so they can have cheep power.

Those who do are obviously mad, & should be consigned to the funny farm. Anyone who suggests we should stop using coal should be dispatched with them. Anyone who believes the East Anglia mob, climate gate anyone, must be deranged, so should join them.

Anyone who says it's OK for others to use coal, but not us, has a problem with reality, & should also be dispatched as well.

There, that fixes the green vote, what's next.

To rpg are you mad?

The nuclear power plant at Fukushima did not survive the recent earthquake and tsunami. There were at least two meltdowns in 4 of the 6 power plants. The Russians told the Americans after two days that caesium had been detected and to get over to Tokyo and have the plant shut down and entombed. That still has'nt happened. Probably because the TEPCO stocks are worthless and the mangers have just walked from their responsibilities like BP tried to do.I suggest you get yourself an education rpg and go to the one of the numerous Hiroshima Day public lectures held every-year in August to inform the world about the cost in human lives of nuclear power. It is because of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima that Germany has gone completely cold on nuclear. I dont quite understand why you genx/yers with all your flying around the globe that you have absolutely no knowledge or perspective on anything.

Articles like this from Mark always make me scratch my head. I don't know why he writes them.

There are experts in the topic. They are people like engineers and power company executives. Give them the appropriate conditions and they will choose the technology that best suits the business they are in. Suffices to say they are very familiar with varying loads and inputs to their grids and how to handle them. Mark's advice here is case of teaching grandma how to suck eggs.

The financial conditions these people operate in is possibly closer to Mark's area of expertise. Maybe he could usefully offer a critique on ways you use finance to nudge the power industry towards a goal, be that reducing CO2 emissions or using renewable sources. Maybe he could comment on which of RECS, carbon trading, a carbon tax, or just picking winners like Abbott wants to do is the best way of going about things. But no, Mark seems very keen on telling us who the winners and losers ought to be in the engineering game, despite being a neocon and hence supposedly a feverent free market supporter.

If anybody here is interested in learning about the challenges of managing wind power from the experts in the power industry here is a background article about it that appeared in the IEEE PES magazine. IEEE PES is the Power and Energy Society, which operates under American's Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

http://www.ieee-pes.org/images/pdf/open-access-milligan.pdf

I've posted this link before and will probably post it again. Facts from experts in the field are an excellent antidote to the political spin masquerading as factual commentary we are so often served here on OLO.