Warmair,

You are simply guessing and making stuff up. You haven't a clue what you are talking about. Read about biomass here (my post), but there are many authoritative studies. Forget it. Renewables cannot provide much of the world's electricity. I gave you references. Read them and make a genuine attempt to understand. Challenge your beliefs.

calwest,
You are falsely accusing me of ignoring the monstrous cost of putting in place enough wind and solar power to meet demand. I'm not ignoring it at all! I'm saying that when spread over the life of the project it''s far from monstrous.

I can't understand how it isn't obvious what happens when "the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine"? Why do you think I said we'll need more peakload capacity?

There's negligible cost in alienation of land because land in Australia is plentiful - it's lack of water that's the limiting factor on agricultural productivity. And much of the renewable power generation permits other uses of land to continue undisrupted below it. As for the impact on people, that's tiny compared to the impact on people from fossil fuels.

The reason I write in theoretical terms is because I'm writing about what could be done.

There has been substantial warming in the last 18 years, and to reduce our impact we have to start somewhere. At the moment Australia's intransigence is providing other countries an excuse for inaction. But if we lead by example, showing other countries that it can be done at minimal cost, we will encourage those countries to do much more.

Aidan,

How long do you think the lifespan of a wind farm is? The turbines are spinning machinery, which are not likely to exceed 20yrs without replacement, and considering the maintenance costs are far higher than for traditional generation systems, the costs are not likely to ever drop anywhere near fossil fuel generation. This is not even including the vast cost of maintaining a huge peak load system that is idle 90% of the time.

As for the warming over the last 18 years, I believe that there has been some warming, however, the warming has clearly slowed, and the trends are lower than the lowest predictions in the late 90s.

Shadow
A quick check on the internet reveals the following figures for maintenance of the various types of power stations.
Coal 20 days per year
Hydro 7 days per year
Natural gas 5 days per year
Wind turbine 3 days per year

The life expectancy of a wind turbine is 20 years.
Operation and Maintenance costs make up some 20-25 per cent of the total levelised cost per kWh produced over the lifetime of the turbine.
The cost of maintenance based on the European experience is about A$ 1.6 cents per kilowatt hour.

The only electrical generators without spinning parts are PV panels.

The cost of wind power is typically around $82 per MW/hr. Coal power is being sold into the grid at around $40 per MW/hr, but if a new coal plant were built today the levelised cost is estimated to be the same as wind, this is due to the higher environmental standards that would be imposed on new coal plant.

The primary reason for eliminating coal fired generation is to reduce CO2 emissions, but in any event coal fired generation is fraught with pollution and health problems.Once you accept this, then whatever other option you choose is either going to need subsidies, or is going make power more expensive.

Again a long argument about the wrong argument !
The problem is not global warming it is energy reliability.
Oil and coal are coming to their end of economic usage. While we have
plenty of coal if we don't flog it all off, we are in trouble much
sooner with oil.

If we install enough solar and wind to run Australia, what happens
when as we had the week before last We had at least three days with
solid overcast and very little wind.
Think what that means, on the last sunny and windy day we had to
generate for that day and the three subsequent days and still have
enough energy stored, plus storage losses, to startup the next, hopefully sunny, day !

In other words when you talk of costs you are only costing for that
days consumption. To cope with that, presuming you have such a large
storage, you need to build three to four times the generating capacity !

That is just for three overcast days.
Even connecting the grid over large geographical areas does not solve
the problem, it just passes the storage problem to others, but more
importantly it means a very large expenditure in transmission lines
to cart much larger currents around the country.

Is it not time for those proposing alternate energy systems to explain
how they intend to supply 24 hour 7 days a week 52 weeks a year ?
Until they do do not buy property above three floors.

Bazz

There is a wide range of views as to how much carbon we can add to the atmosphere before we run into serious climate problems. They range from, we have already overshot the amount that is safe, to a fairly high estimate of some 475 billion tons of carbon by the IPCC. The economically viable know sources fossil fuels is already equivalent to over 1000 billion tons of carbon so no a relatively safe level of AGW is not limited by fossil fuel reserves. In the past it was possible to make a case that AGW would be limited by fossil fuel supply, if one assumed that amount of warming due greenhouse was at the very low end of expectations. Since then however we have found economical ways of exploiting tar sands and fracking which has added greatly to the viable fossil fuel supplies.

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_trillion-ton_cap_allocating_the_worlds_carbon_emissions/2703/

To supply Australia's current electrical needs from renewable sources is not a problem. Wind when available produces adequate amounts of power and that is something like 5 days out of 7. Solar power based north of the divide can probably do better at up to 6 days out of 7. Typically solar power will be available when wind is not and vice versa, but there will be a few occasions when neither are, on those few occasions we have to fall back onto hydro, biomass and storage, and they could potentially cover 2 days out of 5 which would still leave room for them to meet peeking power demands. It really is a no brainer, the problem is it costs more than the current system, and some large coal fired stations stand to lose a lot of money if they are closed down and so will continue to operate as long as possible unless action is taken to put a price on carbon.

http://bze.org.au/zero-carbon-australia-2020