bla bla bla climate change not real, bla bla bla hate Labor bla bla bla Greens even worst bla bla bla, Tony great, he really is.

Nope! The real problem was and remains the choices, which happen to be both expensive and intermittent!

What we need to focus on with our limited means, is choices that literally walk out the door!

Like cheaper than coal thorium, which if connected to myriad micro grids, will provide base load power and for half the price we pay now, or less!

Or homemade biogas, which if scrubbed and feed into onsite ceramic fuel cells, would provide household 24/7 power for quarter of what we are forced to pay now!

I mean, you be forgiven for believing that our so called leaders just didn't understand that we; and indeed, every other western style economy rests only on two support pillars, energy and capital!

And only ever risked by (profits before people) privatization; the blind and single minded Samson, we would chain to these two support pillars!
Rhrosty.

As the price of gas rises wind power may be able to stand on its own without the $40 per Mwh REC subsidy. At 40% efficiency a Mwh of gas fired electricity needs 9 GJ = 3.6/0.4 of gas. The price is now $4 but suppose a GJ of gas goes to $8 so 9 GJ costs $72. Depending on location and turbine size we could have something like
full time gas: fixed gas cost $70 + fuel cost $72 = $142 per Mwh
idled gas and wind: fixed gas cost $70 + wind $70 = $140
No need for the REC as wind is economic as a gas saver.

However I'd prefer a hard line ETS where the CO2 cap comes into play. Wind and solar will find their own level if the cap is tough enough. For Australia as a whole wind could get from 5% to 30% of generation, where SA is now. BTW biogas will not replace more than 10% of our current gas needs according to US and UK studies.

Oh god!

Here we are, with our economy in the process of collapsing. Deserts around the world are greening, after flora has suffered millennia of starvation rations. Increased nutrient value of increased CO2, can do nothing but good for the planet, & so many clowns want us to move to more expensive electricity to reduce it.

Surely the collapse of South Australia as a viable state, in no small way due to it's obsession with expensive green power, should warn our dills, but it doesn't.

The only thing we had going for us, before China made us temporarily rich buying our iron ore, was our cheap coal based power. Now that iron prop is sliding out from under us, our dills want us to shoot ourselves in the foot, by transferring even more to expensive Mickey Mouse electricity.

We need to get back to the cheapest power on earth, coal generation, or we will become the poor white trash of the south Pacific, & deservedly so.

BTW, every family produces enough waste to produce enough biogas to completely power their homes 24/7! If you add in the food scraps/wastage, even a salable surplus!

If you replace the conventional engine with solid state ceramic fuel cell, double the salable surplus!

Clearly hydro electric doesn't require a endless fuel, is vastly cheaper than coal, particularly, in the context of a national grid! And let's be clear, dams also need to be decommissioned!

Yet even as cheap as Hydro is it is more expensive than cheaper than coal, thorium, attached to micro grids!

All that prevents the changeover to vastly less expensive power is vested interest, with their investments tied up in coal or the trendy alternatives!

One recalls the time when Bob Brown said he'd rather have a coal powered power plant in tassie, than dam that river!

And others are welded to wind or solar, given vested interest as suppliers or installers.

Simply put, most of those skills will work just as well when applied to very localized (half price) thorium power or (quarter price) even more localized biogas production/utilization!

And if the domestic market is just 10% of the gas market, so what!?

What matters is the increased discretionary spending this frees up; and the implications for local manufacture, especially one completely resuscitated by half price power, and made even cheaper by just dealing out price gouging private players and their gold plated delivery systems!

Then we wonder why Holden is leaving S.A., or why their energy consuming ship yards find it hard to be competitive!?

Look, a coal fired power station need to burn millions of tons of coal every year; ever escalating in price, and trucked in by the train load!

Whereas, a CHEAPER THAN COAL thorium power plant, might be flat out using more than a truckload a year, meaning they could buy and stockpile their entire fuel requirements for the entire life of the plant; and at today's prices, even as the plant was being commissioned!

Meaning, they'd become progressively, even cheaper again, in any fair comparison with coal!
Rhrosty.

Off topic:

Its not that the Abbott Government is a support system for the media empire that supports Abbott

http://www.smh.com.au/business/rupert-murdochs-us-empire-siphons-45b-from-australian-business-virtually-taxfree-20150405-1meu0l.html