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.