Tom Quirk's article should be the introductory operating manual for those unfortunates tasked with the almost impossible job of achieving commercial success by directing government money towards clean energy technologies.

As he suggests, their first step after examining their brief might be to walk away. Governments themselves have waxed and waned in their enthusiasm for R&D of all kinds. The current waxing phase is obviously politically motivated; the electorate has been seduced over several decades into a love affair with green energy and is now keener than ever to have that love requited. Alas, the chances are slim. Even if they were just average for R&D projects, those chances might reach 10% or so (but don't look for an authoritative number because even CSIRO cannot tell you their project success hit rate). But this time the success rate is likely to be even smaller for the simple reason that instead of the usual game of picking winners the government has decided to exclude them. That is, by quarantining CCS and staying silent on nuclear energy (which by the way the public is demanding be made safer, an obvious topic for productive research), the government has simply increased the prospects of backing losers.

The best advice one can give to anyone involved in setting up and running the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is to make sure they are properly indemnified.

So we spend $10 billion a year on government R&D. Surprisingly this is the source of some innovation but clearly less than the return from that financed by businesses. The $10 billion a year is a useful place to start making spending economies. Much of this government expenditure genuflects to the government's agendas of environmental issues especially greenhouse and therefore tends to add negative value.

Added to this vast unproductive waste we have research funded into the soft issues like housing, education, welfare where the programs offer little pretence to be anything other than being make-work for politically correct academics who will use the research to ignite fresh wasteful expenditure

There has been the excuse that university fees are high, so as to fund university research.

When university research yields so little, it is time to look more closely at the fees charged by universities.

I am wondering how research into reducing energy consumption fits into the equation. Surely it would be more useful to reduce electricity usage (and there are a million ways to do this), than to research how to produce more electricity that will ultimately be at a cost to the consumer, and often reduce natural resources and create pollution.

Perhaps there is little financial gain for researchers, if they are researching ways of reducing energy consumption.