This articles FAILS to bring in 2 major issues. That is:

- the Political Power that is important in decisions on energy sources, and

- Price Levels (placed by the regulation-taxation regime).

Example 1 - For example the efficiency of fracking in Australia is strongly influenced by political tolerance of relatively little tested environmental standards and considerations. State Governments more easily tolerate environment (eg farmer) sensitivities due to the up-front buy in taxes-fees that energy companies are prepared to pay to states.

Example 2 - the efficiency of nuclear energy in France is heavily influenced by French decisions to have a dual use civilian-military nuclear weapons capability. With weapon sector considerations (eg. storage of high level nuclear waste in France itself) strongly influencing civilian consumer prices.

Pete

Taswegian, theres two main factors that determine when people will charge their electric cars: when they can, and when electricity is cheap. The third most important factor is likely to be convenience.

If the consumer electricity price varies with the wholesale electricity price, most of the charging will be done when electricity is cheap, which by the time electric cars enter widespread use, is likely to mean when it's all sourced from renewables.

But if consumers are paying a flat rate, or even just peak and offpeak rates, they'd probably just charge their electric vehicles at night. And pay much higher electricity bills.
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Rhosty, I'm pretty sure thorium fluoride isn't practical for solar thermal — being radioactive it's quite expensive to work with, and I don't think it's specific heat capacity is particularly high (though I admit I haven't checked). Its real significance is in nuclear power generation.
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Curmudgeon, the Sydney Opera House was built with the best analysis that was available at the time, but the idea of using shell elements was new and they had to resort to using physical models. Nowadays it would be done fairly easily with finite element analysis, but back then the entire world didn't have the computing power that would require!

It was the subsequent change to a more conventional structure that diminished its suitability for staging operas.

Australia has about 18m cars. Suppose half were replaced by EVs each requiring 10 kwh for about 40 km of daily travel. That's 90 Gwh of EV charging per day. That does happen to be about the average daily renewables output of 32,566 Gwh/365 but that is not currently used seriously for electric cars and it's pooled with 87% fossil electricity.

We'd need to double our renewable output and somehow make in coincide with the times that people want to charge their cars. Since I live in dry looking hydro country I suspect our renewable output will be way down this year. If the electric car revolution ever happens we will need new power sources that produce at times people want.

Rubbish Aidan. The design for the Sydney opera house was a competition. The winner was a half baked thing, designed to look pretty, with no expectation of serious consideration.

In the event the arty farty dills prevailed, the sail design won, & it was only after the fact that it was found to be impossible to fit a sensible opera venue under the flights of fancy the roof represented.

This fits renewable power perfectly. Fools want to believe it is wonderful, engineers have tried to make it work, & smarties have made a fortune out of this stupidity.

Aidan, I wasn't referring to a theoretical concept, but a huge (economies of scale) coal competitive working thorium fluoride salt, solar thermal example, in the Californian or Arizonian desert.

And a thorium isotope (thorium 302, as memory serves) has removed the need to use uranium to jump start a cheaper than coal thorium reactor.

Yes there is some radioactivity, so also in air travel; and far less than that currently found in safer than coal, electricity generating oxide reactors!

Concentrated and focused sunlight, collected via moving mirrors, is enough to excite the thorium/fluoride (acid and a base compound) salt in a tower; which in turn retains heat (base load power) for literal days!

Pity there's not a single government in this entire land, with that much pragmatic foresight/future vision!

It's easy to sow the seeds of doubt, except where we have proven working examples! Nice try though!
Rhrosty.

We could also start getting smart and not wasting electric power.

Little things like switching off lights when there is no one in a room.
Putting whistles on electric kettles, on average modern self switching off kettles boil for ten seconds before switch off.
Whistling kettles boil for an average of 3 seconds because the noise is annoying.

Multiply both examples by millions.