People accept instinctively statements like 'it's not economic to grow bananas in the Simpson Desert'. However if you point out the shortcomings of wind and solar it is regarded as blasphemy. Intermittent sources of energy are held out as a saviour that will cleanse all our sins. The fact is compared to producing their rated capacity on a 24/7/365 basis wind and solar aren't there 60-90% of the time. Coal, gas and nuclear are there 90% of the time.

The supposed fixes for this intermittency including over building, connecting distant sites and energy storage. All of this costs money and may still fall short. Neither large scale (photovoltaics + batteries) or (solar thermal + molten salt storage) will cover overcast conditions more than a day or two in duration. Yet realtime wind and solar are paid a premium in the form of subsidy but they don't provide a premium service. That means the despised fossil fuel backup generators (probably gas fired) have to save the day.

Just how much wind and solar should go in the generation mix is an unresolved question. If batteries come down in price 75% like solar panels their role could increase. Therefore subsidies must be temporary with CO2 restrictions as the key incentive. Let the market figure out the least cost combination for a given CO2 rate.

Wow! An academic who can actually think, see through the bull dust & get to the facts.

Thanks Don, for an interesting article. But tell me, do any of your old friends & associates still talk to you?

Every dollar spent on renewables other than hydro is money given to a spiv or ideological nutter.

The penny has finally dropped that wind and solar do not work. The reason why they do not work is simple; they are intermittant.

Tom Quirk has an interesting article on this intermittancy:

http://aefweb.info/data/Wind%20farming%20in%20SE%20Australia.pdf

The important distinction is between installed capacity [ic], capacity factor[cf[ and the new boy, what Tom Quirk calls, reliability point [rp].

Looking at Table 1 from Tom's paper we can see the usual suspects; if we use Cullerin range we can see that the ic is 30MW and their cf is 34% or 10.2 MW.

That 10MW is the actual power produced as an average over a period, usally at least a 1/4.

What the rp shows is the probability at any one moment of that cf occuring; for Cullerin it is 3%; so what I take from that is that at any moment the odds of the Cullerin installation producing usable electricity is 34/100 X 3/100 = 0.0102 or negligible.

The only way around this is to store the power from the wind or solar farm and release it as usable electricity in a steady flow; but that has 2 insurmountable problems; the first is storage and the 2nd is the simple fact that if you are storing the power produced by wind and solar you can't be using it at the same time.

People who have promoted wind and solar and who are still making money through subsidies should be held to account.

Solar and wind power sounded like a good idea to anyone outside the electricity business, but the difficulties if using them on 24/7 grids that have to be constantly balanced for frequency and power with teh load on teh grid always changing are vast. In small quantities they might actually save some carbon, but in large chunks they can destablise the grid and require too much spinning reserve back-up (meaning they don't save much carbon).

The SA grid, which has lots of wind power, can be balanced by importing power from the other states, so spinning reserves aren't required. But wheat happens when all of Easter grid has lots of wind??

As I've pointed out before there are, in any case, real problems with expanding the renewables base. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14297 .. and they are adding to power prices just at a time when network investment is pushing prices through the roof. Time to scale back our commitment to green power.

Solar and wind generated electricity can and do contribute to reducing use of fossil fuels but not to replacing them – at least not until ability to store large quantities of energy have been developed.

However, there is one source of energy, already in use overseas, which does produce electricity 24/7/365 and can replace fossil fuels: geothermal heat. Hot granite located 4,000 – 5,000 metres beneath the surface, mostly in South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory can be and is being accessed by drilling.

Water injected down one hole is superheated by underground hot rock and forced up a second hole as steam which is used to drive a turbine and generate electricity before being re-injected down to the hot rock. This closed loop system is free of emissions and enables uninterrupted electricity generation which can be fed into the National Grid.

Heat mining is now being widely undertaken in Australia with a view to producing reliable, clean, continuous electricity generation. Geothermal energy is already used to generate electricity in Australia and many other countries.

Wet geothermal works because as in Iceland and New Zealand you are basically sitting on a volcano.

Dry geothermal does not work; the rock is too far down and the steam recondenses on the way up, assuming you can drill through the rock in the first place, and if you do you don't cause a land slippage which is far more common than with fracking.

No viable dry geothermal exists anywhere and as Flannery's Geodynamics shows at the cost of $100 million of taxpayers' dollars the technology just isn't viable in Australia; it's as hopeless as wave or tidal power.

Another interesting thing about geothermal is that as the superheated steam comes up it releases millions of tonnes of sequestered CO2 from the surrounding bedrock.

The fact is the alternative to coal already exists, nuclear with Thorium waiting in the wings.

Without the lie and scam of AGW renewables would remain in the fringe where they belong.

Solar thermal might be?
Economies of scale and automated solar reflector production, will produce power for less than the cost of coal fired power!
Moreover, the fuel remains free well beyond the service life of any facility!
Relatively impoverished Chile, built such a facility and sold reticulated power from it, for less than the coal fired equivalent! It's already done, rather than some hypothetical wish.
And as indicated, molten salt will store heat for up to two days.
There are places in the outback like around lake Eire, where the sun shines 365 days a year, only interrupted by very occasional short lived summer storms?
So, there are places we could site such a facility, and expect reasonably reliable energy.
However, transmission losses, would require double capacity, when measured against demand.
This is why we must look at micro power stations, like say (a) NG/methane powered ceramic cell(s) in every home, high rise, office tower, village or suburb.
The advantage is endless free hot water, minimal emissions, which are mostly pristine water; and, the cheapest power on the planet!
A 60 coefficient, compared to coal, @20%!
A number, which is effectively halved by transmission losses?
Australian ingenuity has produced the world's best, water cooled ceramic cell, and the odourless, shipping container sized, two tank, closed cycle digester system, which turns "our" biological waste into bladder stored methane, and indeed, enough peak demand 24/7 power, to power any high rise, village or suburb; and indeed, produce a saleable surplus, if you include food scraps or wastage.
The question we should be asking is, not what are the endlessly sustainable viable alternatives?
But, why in the name of sanity, aren't we already deploying those already shown to produce reliable power, and indeed, for a lot less than carbon producing coal!
I mean, is the frozen tundra now melting?
And or, is our home planet in deep do do, or not!
Rhrosty.

Rhrosty No, No & No.

The tundra is not melting, the planet is not in any kind of do do, deep or otherwise, & all those Micky Mouse power systems are only just slightly better than non at all.

You have been reading from the radical ratbag greenie song sheet again, haven't you? You've been warned about this before.

Stop it or you will go blind.

Rhrosty

hate to rain on your parade but the solar and PV stuff here is not going to get past pilot plant stage for quite a few years yet.. its still going to be just wind. I linked an article that pointed all this out in my earlier post..

Now as for your Chilean plant. I'm sure its sold electricity because almost any fool of a power utility will buy green power no matter how expensive, but generating 24 hours consistently?.. sorry, not buying.. one Spanish pilot plant in an alpine desert has managed to get to 24 hours for a time and is expected to manage 20 hours a day reasonably often, but you will find all green power plants boasting day round power actually do so because they also use gas.

If the power station you mention does do what you say then look at the find print of the company handouts on it, and look for the word gas. Also look at the stated capacity.. anything under 50 megawatts is a pilot plant, and then see if you can find a capacity factor as per cohenite's article.

COHENITE
Also read Quirk's article.. the Australian Energy Market Operator has already said what capacity factor (these terms can vary, but I prefer average output as that's what it means) you allow for wind installations.. it depends on the season but it various between 28-31 per cent, from memory.. its on the AEMO site somewhere. I use 30 per cent to save messing with fractions.

Another interesting figure is the contributory factor.. that is the percentage of installed capacity the AEMO will count towards the capacity it must keep on hand at all times.. this is just 3 per cent in summer and 8 per cent in winter (again from memory - I've written about it on the OLO site..). In other words, the wind farms will replace hardly any fossil fuel capacity..

With Arabia looking to put 110 billion into solar. Hasbeen is not quite there .

Given the variability of Green power, and the introduction of Smart Power meters, how about using this to help it work. When Green energy drops volunteer households could have there power cut back to compensate for the fall in supply

"When Green energy drops volunteer households could have there power cut back to compensate for the fall in supply"

Are you insane; in the middle of winter and the RET has taken away reliable power and people are going to volunteer to do without heating! What planet are you on.

This is the thing with the ratbag advocates of AGW and 'green' energy, an oxymoron; they live in their little fairy worlds with no contact with reality and replace it with the doomsday bogeyman scenario offered by AGW.

I've got a better idea; when the power diminishes the greens should be the first to be made to go without power

Surely Green households would volunteer. A good way for them to prove their love of Earth.

Don,

Excellent article. All you say is familiar to me. But I am wiser now.

Solar power is an enormous waste of money. It will not be viable, at large scale, in the foreseeable future.

Advocacy of solar power is irrational. People who advocate solar power do not understand the costs of it, nor the material requirements. It is not viable at the scale required, and not sustainable (because of the resource requirements, which are about an order of magnitude more than for nuclear for the same electricity output).

Solar and wind need back-up generation or energy storage to allow them to provide a reliable electricity supply and to provide power to meet the varying demand. Solar thermal can provide storage, but it is very expensive. The world’s newest and largest solar thermal power station is now under construction in California. It will have 6 hours of storage. The cost is $19/W average power supplied (and that does not include unplanned outages, for whatever reason), c.f. about $4 - $5 for nuclear in USA, much less in Asia.

The cost of transmission; say about $1,500/MW.km, needs to be included.

We must estimate the cost of the total electricity generation and transmission system. If we do this, we find the following:

“Researchers at the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets (CEEM), University of NSW, did a desk study and presented a paper “Simulations of Scenarios with 100% Renewable Electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market” (Elliston et al., 2011a).

Lang critiqued this here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2012/02/09/100-renewable-electricity-for-australia-the-cost/ and found:

“For the EDM-2011baseline simulation, and using costs derived from the Federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism (DRET, 2011b), the costs are estimated to be: $568 billion capital cost, $336/MWh cost of electricity and $290/tonne CO2 abatement cost.

That is, the wholesale cost of electricity for the simulated system would be seven times more than now, with an abatement cost that is 13 times the starting price of the Australian carbon tax and 30 times the European carbon price. This cost of electricity does not include the costs for the existing electricity network.”

I agree with almost everything in this article except that nuclear reactors have largely been ignored.

The American and Russian nuclear weapons arms race has imposed outrageous costs on humanity. It was known early in the nuclear age that thorium reactors were inherently much safer than uranium reactors but Admiral Richover knew that the uranium route was the only avenue to plutonium for weapons.

There is enough thorium available to supply the current world demand for electric power for 2000 generations. Thorium reactors can be built fail safe and if earthquakes and tsunamis are a risk build them on large barges floating just above the bottom of their cooling ponds (so if they spring a leak they sit on the bottom) with those ponds adequately above sea level; say at least 30m.

In the Japanese tsunami the preventable deaths were all due to failures of civil engineering not nuclear engineering.

I do not know who decided to build a nuclear power station behind an inadequate bund wall or who decided to leave explosion preventative catalyst material out of the reactor dome. Had those errors in design and construction not occurred there would have been much less serious damage at that Japanese nuclear plant.

The nuclear power route, from mine to delivered power, is substantially safer than the fossil fuel route and, if thorium based, produces only very minor amounts of waste.

@Rhosty: "There are places in the outback like around lake Eire, where the sun shines 365 days a year, only interrupted by very occasional short lived summer storms.."

And prolonged daily blackouts from sundown to sunup, don't forget.

As one of our politicians pointed out, you can't expect to develop a solar power industry overnight.

Good one, we all know that day by day our natural resources are getting less which is harmful for environment balance. So it's very important that we use the sources like solar energy, wind energy.

A cost factor systematically omitted from learned (and basically political) discussions of the supposed economic benefit of nuclear power is INSURANCE. All power sources involve risk of damage at or around the power source. How does nuclear stack up? Who pays for damage arising from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Fukushima? Is this damage covered by insurance for which the premiums are paid by those profiting from uranium mining, transport, electricity generation?

Who picked up the tab for the Fukushima disaster? One guess: The Japanese people.

A few years ago there was a sandstorm which came from the middle of the continent, engulfed Sydney and travelled as far as New Zealand. If that had crossed a uranium mine on the way, and scooped up uranium ore mobilised by mining, who would have paid for the hideously expensive cleanup in Sydney? Y'got it: the taxpayers.

Unless the nuclear power industry pays the premiums to insure in full against damage anywhere, any time way into the distant future, nuclear power is a pump for transferring money from the many to the few.

Notwithstanding all of the above and the article itself, there still remains a huge problem. Conventional oil has peaked globally; the era of cheap oil in any form is over.

90% of goods transported to and within Australia require cheap oil for our economy to work and function at any level of acceptable stability.

If you look at the true statistics, Europe, the US and most of the remaining western world is in recession. To boot, China's economy is braking hard, India is still growing somewhat, Japan is a basket case and the remaining BRIC have anaemic growth. Notwithstanding this fact, the price of oil (petrol and diesel) is at almost historic highs generally across the globe. Central banks are straining to produce inflation, and developments in emerging markets (Brazil, China etc) suggest a deflationary shock is now highly likely.

What happens when you get some real (not fait credit derived) growth, well I will tell you: you will see a crash of the global economy.

The price of oil, already well above median norms will skyrocket, then crash as it did in 2008, the next big crash is bound to happen in 2013, all the indicators are there to be seen if you look hard enough, this time Australia will not be immune and our economy will be hammered.

You can have all the coal, hydro, solar, nuclear, geothermal energy mix you like, if you can’t move your goods and get things to market, people to work, goods and services traded, the economy contracts and eventually the whole existing economic ponzi scheme falls apart.

Economics is not about money (cash or credit) it is about the exchange of goods and services using cheap transportation fuels, in other words, growth at prices higher than existing is unrealistic.

Unfortunately most economists miss this crucial link and static energy generation (electricity supply) will help little if people can’t get about and goods can’t be transported cheaply.

Our lesson has yet to be learned, we are in for an awful shock.

@Julian: "If that had crossed a uranium mine on the way, and scooped up uranium ore mobilised by mining..."

Unrefined uranium ore is barely more radioactive than ordinary dust, and several times heavier. Any wind powerful enough to pick up a significant quantity and carry it very far would have to be a full-on hurricane, and much more damage would be done by the wind force than by the relatively small amount of uranium ore it could carry. As for the refined product, that's extremely dense and cast into metal blocks; not even Hurricane Sandy could carry that very far.

You'll have to go back to the Big Green Book of Imaginary Disasters and come up with something better than that, I'm afraid.

Re Jon J

If you're right and the ore won't travel that's a few dollars off the insurance premium then. In contrast to the hyped-up AGW, the nuclear industry has done plenty of real damage already, and the insurance companies are cautious about covering it. Google <household insurance nuclear exclusion australia> and think about why.

Don Aitkin should be commended. He is one of the few academics capable of rigorously analysing, thinking about, and speaking independently on the misinformation regarding climate change and renewables .

@ Foyle – you may have got it wrong. Interesting article in Nature this week titled: “Thorium fuel has risks”.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427/full/492031a.html

Agree with Foyle:
Yes everything has risks, even coal-fired power, which can and does produce smoke stack emission, that includes uranium, arsenic, mercury, cadmium and lead, just to mention elements already on the public record. Some of which reportedly turned up in Sydney's water supply?
Thorium reactors are relatively safe, produce little if any emission, use/burn/consume very nearly all their fuel, and produce a very small amount of waste, which is far less toxic, than that produced by oxide reactors; and indeed, eminently suitable for very long life space batteries.
Sand storms whipping through the desert, and picking up lumps of uranium?
Have you ever tried to pick up a lump of gold/copper/uranium ore?
It is HEAVY!
The chance of a sand storm picking/hoovering some up, are almost as remote, as a whirlwind whipping through a junk-yard, and assembling a fully functional and flyable 747?
[The wind power required, would leave only rubble in its wake!?]
I'm not influenced by green ideology, usually just the opposite. But the nightly news has been full recently, of images of melting tundra!
One also notes that none of the detractors or spokespersons for the current status quo, knocked the idea of micro power plants or a national gas grid?
Or biogas production?
We won't ever run out of oil!
Long before we run out of oil, the price to the average consumer will become prohibitive!
And governments who wish to retain power, will have no other option than to proceed apace with viable alternatives. Better every which way for us, if they start now!
Alternatives which will include, large scale farming of very low water use, carbon absorbing algae, some of which are up to 60% oil!
And the production of very low cost hydrogen, utilising the catalytic cracking of the water molecule, solar thermal heat, and endlessly available sea water.
The real problem here, I believe, are various state govt's multi billion dollar electricity generation and transmission holdings, and a reluctance to let go of all the annual millions in revenue, these generate for them, from a captive market!?
Rhrosty.

Footnote: The Israelis are growing price competitive bananas, in their desert, utilising sea water!
Never say never.
The proven Chilean project, didn't ever claim 24/7 power supply.
But it did mesh rather nicely with daylight peak demand, and it did supply power at less than the cost of coal fired power.
And it did reduce demand on increasingly expensive gas/coal/diesel?
And it produced/is producing a marginal profit.
[We do need to slow down the rate with which we extract and use fossil fuel!]
Simply writing something off, because it was a pilot plant, in order to dismiss it; does not compute, or follow logic's rites!
The object of a pilot plant is to prove a concept, before committing large outlays! Nothing more, nothing less.
Having proved a concept, it is usual to expect future economies of scale, will invariably bring the unit, or kilowatt hour, price down.
Something around four square kilometres of solar thermal arrays, in our 50C plus sunlit central desert, would reportedly match current Australian demand; and indeed, save our aluminium smelting industry; and or, reinvigorate our steel smelting industry, using huge electric arc furnaces, waste plastic/rubber/cooking oil, and the Australian invented, direct reduction method?
[When lightening strikes the ground, it fuses everything in its path, and the point of contact, with the ground, produces heat hotter than the centre of the sun; and some of our Pilbra iron ore is so pure, that lumps of it can be welded together.]
Rhrosty.

As is often the case ask the wrong question and you will get the wrong answer.

The question should be is solar power part of a viable mix of power sources which can supply Australia needs? The answer is yes, peek power needs in SE Australia typically occur on very hot days with strong northerly winds these are the conditions where solar and wind are going to work best.

As for the broader question as to whether Australia could provide all its electrical power needs from renewable sources? I have no doubt we could.

The list goes roughly like this in order of cost
Hydro
Geothermal (from the Great Artesian Basin not hot rocks)
Wind (Location is important)
Solar thermal and photovoltaic
Biomass
Tidal
Plus numerous other potential sources are theoretically possible.

The next question is do we want to change our present energy mix to using predominately the list above. The answer is yes we should, If we continue with current mix of energy sources we will inject five times more CO2 into the atmosphere than the climate scientists tell us is safe. Choosing not to believe the scientists is not an option, even if there there is a very faint chance they have got it wrong, would you take off in plane that crashes 9 times out of ten?

The biggest problem is that the fossil fuel companies would stand to lose an incredible amount of money if we were to take the renewable approach. The known reserves of oil are around 1300 billion barrels which at today's prices works out at about $ 110,500,000,000,000. ( you can probably multiply by that 4 to get the total for all fossil fuels) This is a huge incentive, to discredit any reasons anyone puts up, that we should take an alternative path.

Warmair, the only reason some want a variable mix of power supplies is that their favoured system is not viable, & can't compete with sensible generation systems.

Please explain how you have no doubt we can supply oz with Micky Mouse power systems. Every country who jumped into this make believe is now backing out of it, just as fast as they can go, with out falling over.

Spain has had the stupidity belted out of them, the Germans won't say out loud, but it is sending them broke too, hence their retreat. Even the fool poms are waking up. The public don't like paying to stop the windmills, when they are going to break the grid.

The Danes have to give, [yes give], their wind power to Sweden, who can use it to pump water back up hill, isolated from their grid. When ever it is actually working, their grid is in danger.

Do try some reading somewhere other than green sites.

Hasbeen

Hydro power is not a micky mouse system of power generation. The the 3 gorges dam in China produces more power than any other fossil power or nuclear power anywhere in the the world.

Wind power is capable of providing up to 30% of out needs.
Denmark provides 25% of its power from wind again hardly micky mouse.
various forms solar power perhaps another 30%
It is not unusual in Australia for the solar thermal power reaching the surface to reach 1Kw per sq meter hardly micky mouse stuff.

We can fill in the balance with traditional geothermal. The great artesian basin holds some 64,900 cubic kilometres of water and a fair proportion of that is at or close to boiling point.

Yes it will cost to make to the change over but would you rather trash the planet instead ? Sorry that is not a gamble which should be even contemplated.

Unfortunately as I pointed out above the potential value of the fossil fuels is so great that spending millions on a misinformation campaign makes a lot of sense to those without a conscience.

Well Warmair, good luck with trying to get any dams built in western countries, even the water we have gained by damming is now being sent uselessly down to the sea, to satisfy the ratbags.

Even if you could get it past the greenies, where are you going to find some wet mountains to build the things?

Didn't you see, the Danes are having to give their wind power to the Swedes to get rid of it, before it destroys their grid. No fools the Swedes, they know the Danes have to get rid of it, so refuse to buy it.

Oh & people are ending up in psychiatric wards, from the noise of these damn things. Wind power is a very bad joke, making a few very rich, & the rest much poorer.

Geothermal only works if you live beside an active volcano, so no thanks mate, & even you appear to realise solar is another joke, useful only for hot water, & power only if nothing else is available. Ask my brother in law, who is just so happy to get rid of those batteries, & solar cells.

As I suggested to someone else, try reading something other than greenie propaganda, or papers by government funded academics, that is if you want the real facts.

Please advise where I get my oil company money, I've never been able to find it.

One day we'll be able to run our grid off renewable sources but that day is not today. Until we've developed renewable technology to the point where it is viable the obvious choice is nuclear.

Cheers,

Tony

It has taken me two days to get over the depression that hit me upon reading Don Aitkin’s piece. So this was the level of strategic thinking at the top of the Australian research tree in the 1980s and 1990s? That setting priorities for public funding was just a matter of what Don et al personally thought worthy, like solar power? And Don only discovered during his stint at the top the standard 1:10:100 funding rule for getting ideas into commercial practice. Holy cow!

I wrote CSIRO’s 1993 submission to one of the endless government inquiries into research. I explained the principles behind priority setting. It was all to do with customers, with the market. Scientists get ideas but the funding to turn those ideas into products or processes must progressively shift from government to end users, to the ‘market’. If ultimately there is no market for the proposition then the work should end. Of course in practice it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the principle.

With energy, noisy interference from the electorate certainly distorts rational priority setting. Everyone’s an expert; just read OLO Forums. I suppose if taxpayers are paying for science they could claim a legitimate influence. But don’t expect too much in the way of results if that’s the path taken. On that I agree with Don.

I’m not forgetting other kinds of research. Australia must also support ‘blue sky’ research, the quest for new knowledge, as well as R&D for wealth creation. Setting the funding balance is a top level task. Who does it? I challenge anyone to provide an answer.

Pure research should be supported on the basis of unadulterated excellence. That’s how the ARC claims to do it now but I cannot imagine a less efficient process than handing out billions of dollars in tiny chunks based on assessment of individual proposals. What a waste, and all because governments have forever been unhappy (as Don rightly points out) with their returns from research funding. There has to be a better way.

warmair,

You need to update some of your data. Denmark produces 19% of its generation “capacity” with wind farms however; this figure is a peak figure for west Denmark only. In addition, Denmark sends much of its wind produced electricity to Norway and Sweden, mostly at no fee because it is mostly produced when demand is low. They use this electricity to pump water back into their hydro dams. (Apparently dams need a good water supply to operate, some might have missed that)

Denmark is a net importer of coal fired electricity from Germany because spinning backup from conventional base load is needed at peak demand.

Germany is currently building 22 new coal fired power stations which will burn lignite from the former East Germany. Coal is now Germany’s No1 fuel at 33%, growing at 3.2% per annum. Lignite (yuck) is No2 at 26%.

So after 30 years and some 74 bn Euros of investment, Germany has managed to achieve only a 6% contribution to total energy demand and that is from all sources of renewables.

In Britain, “It is understood that the BGS will estimate that the 1,000 square kilometres covered by the Bowland Basin to the east of Blackpool contains 300 trillion cubic feet of gas, equivalent to 17 times the remaining known reserves in the North Sea”. --Timm Webb, The Times, 8 December 2012

Britain’s gas plant build schedule is for 30 new plants by 2030 with 14 in operation by 2019.

Similarly in the USA they have estimated enough gas to meet domestic demand for 600 years and are already in production. “News emerged a few weeks ago that the U.S. will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer in 2017”.

The energy world is about to turn on its head, driven by the need to reduce energy costs and drive economies upwards for the benefit of all nations and not backwards for the benefit of the UN. It is delusional to deny what is happening in the real world by proselytizing defunct dreamer ideology

Wet mountains Hasbeen?
Try our tropical north, where rainfall is measured in metres.
Moreover, it is possible, to inject rainfall into the upland landscape, and slowly release it, making many hydro schemes, which only need extended water surety, viable.
Just a three metre fall, across a thirty metre span, will generate enough power for thirty average homes, and if we were really serious about climate change, would allow ordinary folks, an automatic right to build weirs on any water that flows across their land!
With that right enshrined in law, we could probably build around a million privately owned profit producing, power producing weirs. And work for the dole would likely provide the workforce?
Water is almost the most inert substance on the planet, therefore, the very best way to eliminate erosion, is through building ideally located dams!
Of course the greens are mindlessly opposed to dams, even Bob Brown is on the public record saying, he would prefer a coal-fired power station in preference to damming the Franklin!
If climate scientists are right, then we can expect hotter drier droughts, extreme heat waves, interspersed with even more disastrous wet weather events.
[And one anti-nuclear poster asks, who will pay the insurance bill?]
Even if all the climate scientists are wrong, no harm will be done to us, our economy, or the environment; by building myriad upland dams, designed to slowly release water rather than store it; thereby mitigating against future flood events and ironing out some of the feast or famine nature of our current rainfall events.
Injecting water into the landscape in this way, improves fertility and production outcomes, and forces the salt table lower, simply by placing an envelope of fresh water above it.
Storing the water in the landscape as envisaged, also avoids evaporation losses, which currently costs the Murray around 50% of its annual flow!
Rhrosty.

Rhosty,

I think what Hasbeen is saying is that hydro is a very complex engineering issue that needs some math relating to scale or head amongst other issues. Britain has hydro power but at full total production capacity they run out of water (head) within 6-8 hours.

Just to help you I’ve provided the following link to an on-line calculator. You only need four sets of figures to determine if you have a workable hydro system or not.

Just to give you some idea. In Britain when one of their favorite “soap opera’s” ends at 6:30 p m, everyone goes to put the kettle on for a brew. The man in the control room at a Welsh hydro plant watches his dials intently. The hydro has a lag of only a few minutes when he drops the gate, which he does in time to meet the first flush of demand. After about 8 minutes it is at full capacity and he then switches in the high voltage DC supply from the French nuclear powered grid until demand drops. This pantomime happens several times a week.

They do this because hydro is not the renewable source it is sold as because you cannot refill the dam “on demand” and you must maintain the head. That is why free wind farm electricity from Denmark is used by Norway and Sweden to top their dams.

All you have to do is get those figures for the geographical area for which you are suggesting a scenario, put them into the calculator then post us your results. Then you will start to realize that most of what you posted about annual rainfall etc is utterly irrelevant.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydropower-d_1359.html

Looking forward to hearing from you in relation to “our tropical north”.

What was the implicit question?
How to reduce the carbon load we currently add to the biosphere!
Rather than play angry, boring ping pong, debating style, one suggests we should try dialogue, as a mechanism to contribute our best ideas?
If only to be able to look our Grandkids in the eye, and claim we played our part, did our personal best, in providing a safe and prosperous future; and a better hand than the one we were dealt!
Rather than kick our current raft of problems down the road!
And then expect them to deal with them, even though, we may well have traversed through a tipping point from which there is no retreat?
Simply through allowing egos and or political ambition, or a testostrone fueled, irrational desire to become the richest resident of the local graveyard; to influence outcomes or our response, rather than engage our intellects/best ideas, to effectively deal with our current raft of problems, while we still have time to act.
The proposed ETS has churned lots of money through the now challenged European economy, is highly flawed, hasn't reduced carbon, and has encouraged the Germans to replace their aging nuclear power stations, with coal fired ones?
All a trading scheme will do, is make completely intangible carbon the most traded commodity in the world, and produce a world of money making derivites. Have we learned nothing?
As seen in Europe, it won't reduce carbon, just produce billionaire carbon trading brokers, [eh Combe,] and bigger power bills!
Better we should jettison any ETS, before it gets off the ground, and replace all that costly convoluted complexity, and the rorts it will produce, [bet my house on it,] with a cap and tax proposition?
Cap and tax, would produce a sliding scale cap, and then only tax that component, which exceeds the progressively lowered cap? Now that's incentivation!
Rhrosty.

spindoc

On the subject of updating data
Your information on Denmark comes from a document produced by a group called CEPOS
which has been thoroughly discredited. The reality is they made a silly error and that is, all power exported must have come from wind power, when in fact you could just as well say, that all exported power came from coal power. The real figure is probably around 1% of all wind power is exported.

http://www.energyplanning.aau.dk/Publications/DanishWindPower.pdf

Again the the idea that Denmark is importing only coal fired electricity from Germany is a nonsense.

Yes I agree that currently fossil fuels are a cheap way of producing power, but they get a free ride as they do not have to pay for the probable consequences of injecting large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, and are frequently supported by other subsidies. In the case of Victoria as I understand it they get the coal and water for free as well.

The other alternative is of course nuclear but it is by far the most expensive way of generating electricity that anyone has seriously come up with, historically well over a dollar a kilowatt as compared with less than 20 cents a kilowatt for solar, wind, hydro and geothermal. We see on a regular basis claims by the nuclear industry that next week, next year, or next decade, they will be producing power so cheaply, that it won't be worth the bother of metering. My opinion is that nuclear is too expensive, takes too long to build, has too many problems associated with it, and anyway is unable to compete with renewables on price.

Rhosty,

Sorry petal, that really was horrible to witness. I had no idea you were in therapy. I’m sure you will get back to us with some facts when whatever you are “on” kicks in? Always remember, if reality is that painful, don’t go there.

Rhrosty the only people serious about climate change are.

1/ The greenie ratbags, who want to kill western civilisation.

2/ Governments who need a new source of tax, so use bought & paid for academics to promote a scare.

3/ The poor public, who don't have the time to put in to understand how they are being conned.

Mate you are talking Micky Mouse stuff. You need real water, Sydney harbours full a week, up in the mountains, not on the coast to bother with. I suppose we could use coal fired power to pump the water up there, so we could make hydro with it. Greenies would probably go for that, they are dumb enough not to understand, if we don't tell them about the dams. Call it something like "cyclic Hydro" & use those same bought & paid for academics to promote it.

Ultimately, if you want Micky Mouse stuff, how about the "sealed unit" nuclear power systems used by the US navy. They come in a number of sizes, have an enviable safety record, could be built in a factory & shipped to where needed, & are too small to be a worth while target. Now that's Micky Mouse on a grand scale.

2 big & a medium for Cairns, 2 small for Goondiwindi. Replace one with a medium if the place grows.

The worst thing about Nuclear, is we would probably have to burn coal, just to keep the CO2 level high enough to fertilise the food required, if we don't start listening to Ludwig.

Hi spindoc.
Thanks for the input, wasn't talking about conventional hydro, but rather something based on the alternative German model, which utilises something as small as a three metre fall, much the way old mill wheels did?
Yes you are right, hydro schemes need surety of water, that is why storing trillions of tons of the stuff in the landscape, is such a good idea, on so many fronts!
However, I prefer the almost absolute surety of nuclear power, be it the new generation of super safe waterless pebble reactors, which can be factory Mass produced and trucked on site, and producing cheaper than coal power, in just days!
But only as publicly owned and supplied facilities that have no shareholders or foreign debt burdens to support!
And earn enough, to return any outlays, over say a decade, with any further net returns, used to enlarge the system.
Right now and based on large unmet capacity/demand, we have a unique opportunity, to develop and sell enough thirty year self terminating bonds, to pay for this form of nation building; and say, a roll on roll off nuclear powered national fleet?
And even an inland canal, that massively shortens turnaround time, with regard to Asian markets!
Other than that mate, I prefer thorium!
We have huge reserves of that, mixed with very valuable recoverable rare earths.
We should be building a national nuclear powered, bulk freight forwarding fleet.
Bulk freight forwarding is still almost the most profitable/can't lose business on the planet?
And will be even more so, as fossil fuel supplies decline or become more and more expensive!
Utilising nuclear power, and our huge reserves of thorium or uranium, we will become increasingly independent, earn huge foreign capital; and indeed, even effectively compete with emerging giant economies!
But only if we produce endless cheap power, rebuild our national maritime shipping fleet; and back that, with quite massive reform and simplification of our tax system! to empower entrepreneurial development; and cooperative capitalism!
Rhrosty.

Rhosty,

Ah! Yes, yes of course, the new alternative three foot high German hydro, Mmmm…….?

Gotta dash, let me have the figures for this when….you know…you have them, yes?

And hasbeen, you are right, we will still need to produce Co2, just to fertilize the plants, the trees and those dense dazed cloud dwellers, who frequently hug/merge with them. [Now where did I leave those splinters forceps?]
Given we all exhale Co2, how about 9 billion heavy breathers?
Seriously, many crops can and should be grown under class/polycarbonate.
After the bees have completely finished pollination, a glass/shade house can be routinely flushed with virtually costless Co2, to eliminate predation/pests, all while promoting maximised poison free production!
Cheers, Rhrosty.

Is solar power the answer?

What is the question?

warmair where did you get your cost estimates? Try this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Convert $ per Mwh to cents per kwh by dividing by 10. Agreed nuclear looks costlier than onshore wind but I would make another correction for capacity factor; for example if an intermittent source has c.f. 33% I'd triple the cost to make it comparable to a dispatchable source.

Minemouth brown coal prices in Victoria are said to be in the range $6 to $6.50 per tonne. Piped gas is about $270 per tonne but has much higher thermal energy.

Oil, coal will runout, we need to find a range of replacements. The author is saying we should give up on solar and wind.
Perhaps it's a good thing he is no longer in a position to have any impact on the powers that be.

Wind and solar do not work; Tom Quirk's paper, which I link to above, conclusively proves that; anyone who says otherwise is a fool or a liar; unfortunately fools and liars are controlling the investment of vast amounts of public money into both RET and AGW.

The lights will go out soon; the suckers are being softened up now with the PM's declarations abut goldplating.

There's going to be less electricity while ever the greens/alp government is in power; a nice irony, while they're in power there will be less power.

I agree solar panels are expensive.

Why did i buy them? cost benefit decision. Thanks to govt, through tariffs and feed in tariff, i will do alright in financial terms.

However, system, supposed to produce avrage 19kw per day, still cost me over $12,000. Thsat is equivalent of ten times my current annual electricity bills.

I bought them as part of new house infrastucture to avoid seeing high bills in future. I was lucky to have some spare cash.

For most. it is still expensieve and others have cited how subsidies to solar may also be contributing to higher prices.

Still, i hope solar panels and technoogy will continue to improve, saw a show of German mnaufacuring which produced paper which plays stereo music. They predict paper will even produce solar energy in future.

I like nations and people who think big, rather than accept mediocrity and more of the same as if there is no environmental problems in world.

Good on you Chris; bludgers like you are what are driving electricity prices in this country through the roof; the feed in tariff NSW scheme is going to cost just NSW taxpayers over $4 billion; don't worry about poles and wires, its the nuts and bolts and opportunists on the bandwagon who are sending the country broke.

FITs don't produce electricity; they produce power which is unusable due to its intermittancy and expense; that is both the sum of the scam and the proof that wind and solar do not work; their power is unusable because it is intermittant, haphazard and cannot be collected through existing technology, poles and wires.

And there's Chris fascinated with paper playing music while he collects his handsome stipend; that's all you need to know about the supporters of renewables; getting money off the taxpayers for nothing while they daydream about pixie dust and perpetual motion machines.

Bludger and huge stipend. What would you know moron.

You admitted it, you sanctimonious hypocrite; bad enough I have to pay for your indulgences, now I have to be insulted by you.

Typical AGW alarmist.

alarmist, not really.

I have accepted rocky times ahead. i merely do what i think will be in my self-interest, as best as I can. I also offer my opinion, as reasoned as i can according to my summary of events. i also work for whoever will pay me as long as work is legal, as best as i can.

What is it like not acting in a self interested way, assuming you are a rare excpetion to that rule.

Taswegian
The wiki article re electric prices I would generally accept ,apart from the fact that they seem very confused about nuclear power we have the all the terms below listed in parts of the article.
Advanced Nuclear
New nuclear
Nuclear

The most useful price is what nuclear cost historically and that is much greater than in the article, I have seen figures quoted as high as $2 Kwh but I am willing to accept the figures below as probably in the right ball park, but even then the figures don't include insurance provisions nor I suspect do they take into account that only half of the nuclear plants where construction was started were actually completed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants

According to Benjamin K. Sovacool, the marginal levelized cost for "a 1,000-MWe facility built in 2009 would be 41.2 to 80.3 cents/kWh, presuming one actually takes into account construction, operation and fuel, reprocessing, waste storage, and decommissioning".[58]

In my view anything is better than pumping excess co2 into the air but it seems to me that nuclear has too many problems and is not cheaper than mainstream renewables. You only have to look at the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster . They shut down all of the nuclear plants in the country thus losing 30% of there capacity. The clean up costs are up in the 10s of billions and several plants will never come back online.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Insurance

As a matter of interest I am a member of a club that installed a solar photovoltaic system of some years ago at a cost of some $28,000 (today’s cost is much less). We were quoted a cost $50,000 to connect us to the grid, We are able to supply all our needs except for 3 or 4 days of the year when we have to fire up the back generator. The result no bills but we do set aside money for new batteries in about 10 years time.

Hot Rocks Geothermal has GOT to be made to work.
There is all the energy we could ever need down there.
I was surprised at the comment that CO2 comes up with the steam.
The rocks are granite, how would the co2 get out if it is there at all.

Whatever it costs, it must be made to work, even if it requires the
government to just take it over.

We do not have a lot of time, world peak coal is about 2025 and that
will push the price of our coal to very high levels.
Natural gas from shale is looking like a flash in the pan.
Decline rates between 40% & 60% will see to that.

Bazz,

Hot rocks has sunk without a trace. It presently consumes nearly as much energy to set up as it generates, and consumes vast quantities of water in the desert.

Nice try but no cigar.

Hot rocks has sunk without a trace. It presently consumes nearly as much energy to set up as it generates, and consumes vast quantities of water in the desert.

Nice try but no cigar.
Posted by Shadow Minister
___________________________________________

A few points
The plan is to recycle the water
The do not consume more power they produce, but the current technology is expensive.
The anticipated life span of power plants is around 30 years

There are currently two plants in the world producing commercial amounts of power.There may be others.

The potential is huge but at this stage the technology is experimental. Time will tell how useful this technology is.

In France
Soultz-sous-Forêts

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/05/geothermal-power-warming-to-a-global-opportunity

Landau in south western Germany

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2008/06/geothermal-electricity-booming-in-germany-52588

The situation in Australia is well summarized here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_Australia

SM, I know that they have stopped work, but I don't know if they have abandoned it.
From what I read they were having corrosion problems with the pipes.
There could be other problems as well. Recycling the water is fairly
normal anyway and means hot water going down instead of cold water.
I gather the govt is not putting any more into Geodynamics.

Warmair, the first two references seem to be volcanic not hot rocks.

Bazz
________________
Both the power stations listed below are definitely hot rocks and do not use naturally occurring geothermal hot water as found in places like Iceland.

The technique is similar to fracking and is now given the snazzy name of Enhanced Geothermal Systems or EGS
I messed up the links in my previous post somehow, those given below should be more relevant.

In France
Soultz-sous-Forêts
http://www.bine.info/fileadmin/content/Publikationen/Englische_Infos/projekt_0409_engl_Internetx.pdf
Uses hot rocks at 200 Deg C 5000 meters below surface.
Water is recirculated via a number of bore holes and the heat is then passed through a heat exchanger to generate steam.

Landau in south western Germany
http://www.cleanenergyactionproject.com/CleanEnergyActionProject/Geothermal_Technologies_Case_Studies_files/Landau%20EGS%20Geothermal%20CHP%20Plant.pdf
Uses hot rocks 3000 meters below the surface at 155 Deg C
By the way there are no volcanoes in Germany.

There is a problem in that the method is known to lead to small local earthquakes, which suggests that it may not be suitable in populated areas, but I guess this is hardly going to be a problem in outback Australia, after all the the problem should not be as bad, as fracking for fossil fuel reserves, where they try to make even bigger cracks in the rocks