Gunter. "I tend to prefer studies from outside the respective industries."

Whereby eliminating the input of the very best specialist scientists and technicians, those who are expert, not only in the theoretical and technical aspects of a given problem, but also have expertise in that technologies practical application in the real world.

Well that really is a stunningly myopic view.

How about designing and running a submarine by a committee of fishermen? Marine biologists?

How about weather and climate forecasting from beaurocrats........

JohnBennets; a generally good post but this is just wrong:

"Baseload power plants, of all description, are capable of load following"

Wind and solar CANNOT baseload; read this:

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/a-nation-still-drawing-18000mw-in-its-sleep-cant-go-solar/

The takehome point is this; from the production viewpoint using fossils there is no difference between base and peak because as TonyOz explains the fossils are kept on spinning reserve 24/7; at minimum base, some of that spinning reserve is not used; at peak or what it should really be called, maximum base, the reserve is used as needed.

No extra cost is involved because the machinery is already running; just a switch to draw down the running reserve.

What Gillard and the RET and the greens and assorted nitwits want to do is reduce the running reserve; the result will be drastically altering lifestyle: no aircon when hot and cold; removal of the accoutrements.

The lie is the government thinks or wants the suckers to think that demand management, smart meters etc, will enable this to happen.

This is BS, as TonyOz explains, because the social infrastructure, everything from hospitals, large buildings, to transport, cannot reduce further without shutting down, not being available.

There is no need for this to happen if you think AGW is a lie.

Australia is an energy rich nation but we are pauperising ourselves on the alter of green ideology.

@ Cohenite:

I don't agree with you re global climate change.

I never said that renewables are baseload technologies... read my stuff again.

It is imaginable but not yet available for renewables which include storage to conceivably be able to perform baseload duties some time in the future. We all live in the present.

I have never stated that demand management is not possible and in fact there are many opportunities to achieve this. However it requires realistic, detailed implementation, not wishful thinking.

Just like there are people who just cannot believe in global warming,
for non logical reasons, there are people who cannot believe in peak
oil, just because they cannot believe that the airlines will go out of business.
It just can't happen !

Well there are no rules that support that attitude.
AGW and Peak Oil are both possibilities.
However we will know for certain much sooner with peak oil & coal.
The coal industry, particularly in the US, had not done studies of
their reserves for many years and when someone did it, they were
shocked at their newly established reserves.
There is an additional problem in that the coal quality is falling so
that the heat value is less than it used to be.
Recent studies have been done;
Werner Zittel & Borg Schindler, Kavalov & Peteves,
Upsalla Global Energy and many others. They are all coming to similar conclusions.
Somewhere about 2025 is expected to be world peak coal.
Australia probably has a later time depending on our rate of export.
There is an enormous amount of info on coal if you wish to search.

We have no alternative but to get base load power going, be it
hot rocks geothermal or nuclear. It is looking like there is no way
we can support ourselves at our present standard without them and the
choice is all going back to the farm and work the land while six
billion people starve.

There was an article on the Energy Bulletin by a psychiatrist where
he explained the reason why many people are deniers without reason.
It will be in the archives on that site as it was a couple of years ago.

Thems the choices, geothermal, nuclear or sustenance farming.

JohnBennetts

replying a week later, but only just saw your point. I didn't accuse you of not understanding what you were talking about, but of not understanding what I was saying .. which was talking about load following with a nuclear reactor. I think they are outside your experience because what I said was correct. Read some of the comments on the net about mixing nuclear power and renewables in, say, Canada..
I think you're translating your understanding of the use of other forms of base generator to nuclear.. you may vary then but not by much at all

Now I see you know something about the reserving requirements for a grid which is good.. but as you note the use of base units in this respect is limited. Sorry but you need gas turbines if you're going to have large amounts of renewables on the grid. Actually a lot of them but the variation in base load plants if you hope to get to a penetration of 20 per cent.. which means at times you will have 60 per cent of renewables on the grid (averages, remember and wind farms have an average output of about one third installed..).. the management problems will be appaling.

I will write about renewables at some point for this site and I would welcome your comments then..

Dear Curmudgeon,

Simple fact: French nuclear power stations load follow effectively. As do others, but from a standing start, France reached 2/3rds nuclear penetration in under two decades. This requires them to rely on the very significant load following capacity of their atomic power plant.

Other nuclear pland can and do load follow, but I will rest my case here.

Regarding your inflexible approach to the supremacy of GT's: when you write that article, please ensure that you understand quite comprehensively the differences between OCGT and CCGT. The latter is nowhere near as flexible as the former and has almost similar carbon intensity to baseload coal units. We all get to pay for unreliables (aka "renewables") three times - once by way of capital cost of generating plant, again (as per current German experience) by way of expansion of the grid which is needed to distribute all power everywhere because the sun is shining somewhere and the wind is blowing somewhere else. The third time we pay is for the backup gas turbines - and pay, we will, for fuel, for capital, and for CO2 emitted.

Read a little about small package nuclear designs before rushing into print. They're starting to look very interesting.