I believe California gets over 40% of its electricity from gas fired generation. Cheap natgas and subsidised renewables emboldened green groups to demand the closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. That will increase emissions as gas must do much of the heavy lifting. Maybe greens aren't really that concerned about emissions. Meanwhile massive amounts of gas leaked from underground storage at Porter Ranch. Perhaps gas is not the salvation after all.

Now eastern Australia plans to export 70% of its gas production as LNG. A year or two ago the spot price of piped gas was about $4 a gigajoule recently in Adelaide it got to $22 during wind power lulls. Enthusiasts say batteries will save wind and solar energy for downtimes but present battery capacity is orders of magnitude too small. If the US repeats this experience the lesson should sink in though maybe it will go over the head of deep greens.

Well Nick, given NG (methane) is a finite resource? You've eventually got to be right some day?

Unless long absent pragmatism replaces the greed is good model that seems to momentarily rule the massively manipulated energy market?

And that very pragmatism will see the rollout of many more, can't lose, large scale solar thermal plants like the very successful private enterprise projects in California or Arizona now more than competing with similar scale coal fired projects, in total roll out costs or peak demand!

I take it you don't see any prospect of us running out of sunshine any time soon?

Or the price for that commodity rising exponentially due to deliberately contrived or confected shortfall? Sob weep!

Something else we're never likely to run out of is human biological waste! Which if collected onsite, via an Aussie invented (buriable) two tank system digester, is capable of providing all the power, as bladder storable methane gas, any average family needs and endless free hot water! Moreover, adding in food waste produces a never ending salable surplus!

Further, if the marginally modified diesel is replaced with more Aussie innovation, as a ceramic fuel cell, where the combination of scrubbed gas and the gas consuming fuel cell, with a world beating 80% energy coefficient, and endless free hot water, that salable surplus could rise above 50% of the energy production!

Really smart operators who want to get rich quick and stay rich? Would read the writing writ large upon the wall, get on that never ending gravy train and just make it happen!

And in the process, make the world's largest economy the most successful one once again! And rescue countless others!
Alan B.

In both the UK and the US it is thought that biomethane will struggle to replace more than 10% of current natgas consumption. Refer to the Brit's 'poo bus' project. There is a curious link between biomethane and synthetic or Sabatier methane. Sludge digesters typically produce 25% CO2 (a flame retardant) that needs to be scrubbed from the desired CH4. In Germany that scrubbed CO2 is reacted with hydrogen to make synthetic methane
http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/audi-opens-6-mw-power-to-gas-facility_100011859/#axzz4H5b8YfWF
When I last heard the gas was 4X as expensive as natgas imported from Russia. Things will have to get desperate to go down this path.

As always, there are mountains of misinformation put out pertaining to biogas!

If some of the fallacious arguments tallied none of the third world countries currently collecting and using this gas wouldn't be able to afford to do so!

Scrubbing with hydrogen is what makes it expensive, given the cost and methodoloy of producing hydrogen!

A better approach is utilising vacuumed water, which has a natural affinity for Co2, which collects the Co2 bubbled through several tanks of degassed water, degassed in a traditional vacuum tower at 30 inches of mercury.

A simple stock standard exhaust pipe muffler equipped with the sulphur removing catalyst, removes sulphur dioxide (rotten egg gas)

This degassed water method works to remove both oxygen and Co2, both of which have a natural affinity with water. But particularly Co2!

This could be a continuing process repeated a couple of times if required, given the processed methane has little affinity with water.

The very last thing the misinformation spreading cash strapped Russians need is their gas customers switching to endlessly sustainable homemade biogas, which will run a marginally modified diesel (a little steel wool shoved down the inlet manifold) as is, all while supplying free hot water!

And given that is done on the same site as the gas production, minus the cost adding poles and wires, transmission and distribution losses, for less than half what the price gouging coal-fired power companies charge now.

The advantage of the super silent ceramic fuel cell is, after the doubled (80%) energy coefficient, which halves the cost yet again, the exhaust product is mostly pristine water vapor!
Alan B.

Alan B please help me here. I keep hearing about the marvels of technology that is thwarted by Big Coal or some such. I cannot understand how a cheaper energy source does not just take off and take over?
It has me beat same as Solar and Wind cheaper than coal BUT? After that it gets a bit hazy, nefarious people are agin it, Government is protecting secret interests.
Let's drop all subsidies and let the cards fall where they will enough wasting of money and and endless bulldust!

The fossil fuel industry is reportedly worth somewhere north of 4 trillion annually, With historical examples of politician and or retired politicians lobbying on behalf of that enormously powerful industry, or obvious self interest reasons!?

Then there's our current power plant operators, many of whom are fully imported debt laden foreign players, who having acquired a controlling interest need mug consumers to fund their purchases!?

So any move toward real energy reform, even where that may even result in far cheaper power; already has a powerful army, with monumental mountains of misinformation ranged up against it!?

Along with a shoot (discredit) the messenger campaign!? Ably assisted by some asinine activists with personality problems, one of which appears to be a very limited ability as critical thinkers, or indeed, any actual ability to think for themselves or even recall what they said earlier the same day!?

And behooves those who would like cheaper vastl more sustainable energy and the economic improvement it would ring in, to do their own in depth research!

Rather than stop thinking because some Russian troll, with Russia's countervailing oil and gas funded economic interests front and centre, wants The power and control they used to have returned rather than further eroded or removed entirely!?

There are many and varied other reasons for forestalled alternative development! But word limits and my available free time prevent me from outlining them! That said if you want change you will need to vote for it! And that may require deserting the folk, including the historically disingenuous anti development greens you used to vote for, who've presided over the current outcomes or lack of real reform!
Alan B.

The facts and truth sure are difficult to find.

http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2016/08/05/Green-power-has-a-long-way-to-go.aspx

I should add, this "Aussie innovation" relies on a closed cycle, smell free, two tank system! Where the first tank operating at around 32C utilises aerobic preparation, the second utilises anaerobic production and a temperature of around 55 C, which together, sanitizes the byproducts (valuable reusable nutrient loaded water and carbon rich soil improver) and maximises the methane production!

[If produced on a significant large scale the aforementioned sanitized byproducts, would support an even larger algae based oil production industry, which in turn could support an impressive ethanol industry that required no arable land nor reassigned fo0d production!
Look, farmed algae, farmed in closed cycle systems for maximised production need only 1-2% of the water of traditional irrigation!]

Enough it would seem from two shipping container sized, buried tanks to power a small village!

Moreover, given the adroitly avoided SMELL FREE nature of a completely closed cycle system, the deliberately derogatory poo power nomenclature, works well as vexatious mischievous propaganda by the poting activists!

Even so, Apple H.Q. are using badder stored scrubbed biogas, produced in the foregoing described manner, to along with a small solar farm to power their new off grid H.Q. 24/7 via ceramic fuel cells!

This along with an array of other applications, some of which rely on animal sourced biological material, in England, Norfolk Island, parts of Scandinavia and many impoverished third world countries! Are effectively demonstrating the inherent advantages of not wasting your waste, which for most of the developed world is sent seaward as billions of tons of problematic waste! And given how cheap the power made from this waste is, downright dumb!

[The smarter Danes are if memory serves, running the capital's entire taxi service on homemade biogas, sourced from cow manure!]

And these myriad working examples demonstrate, where smart folks ought to be aiming their poo, poo commentary! As opposed to their poo, poo Putin pleasing propaganda!?
Alan B.

Alan B,

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull should be absolutely interested and active in assisting development of infrastructure along lines of waste treatment bioreaction and fuel production you have described.

If not why not?

Will major media investigate and report such apparent opportunity?

Yes JF Aus the truth is very ephemeral.
One of the factors never mentioned in relation to "alt energy" is the
embedded energy in the construction and installation of those systems.
In fact without the coal & oil industries the alt energy systems would
never be built. Can they reproduce themselves ?

There is a further rising problem with the thermodynamics of our current economies.
I have only recently read about this concern so I am a bit misinformed
on the concerns that have arisen. It relates to net energy and ERoEI
in the system.
The link you referred to did not mention that the Germans have to pay
the Swedes to take energy from Germany. ie German electricity has a
negative Euro value !
Together with negative interest rates, who says there is not a problem in Germany's economy ?

Some greens are coming to the conclusion that nuclear may be the only
option. Thorium reactors seem to be an ideal conclusion although the
opportunity to burn up all the uranium waste should not rule out uranium reactors.
Could all the nuclear weapons keep us in power for years ?