I think the firming requirement levels the playing field. The virtuous wind and solar generators are low carbon but tend to go AWOL suddenly. The evil combustion plant is reliable but is forced to throttle back when subsidies and shortfall charges make them uncompetitive. Meanwhile power prices and emissions keep rising.

In his Press Club talk today Finkel gave the example of a 100 MW wind farm being required to supply 10 MW for 4 hours during wind lulls. Presumably a 100 MW solar farm would have to chip in 10 MW until mid evening too bad if it was a cloudy day earlier. Then they'd have to do a unique deal with a gas generator. This might work we don't know yet if the modelling is accurate. It puts conditions on both low and high carbon generators which probably means the ALP and LNP will cut special deals to help their favourites.

"In his Press Club talk today Finkel gave the example of a 100 MW wind farm being required to supply 10 MW for 4 hours during wind lulls."

I thought Finkel was on about reliability of renewables/storage, not renewables/gas. What a cop-out.

This stupidity further marginalizes base-load providers, including any prospective ultra-super-critical coal or nuclear.

On the flimsiest of pretexts he has omitted the nuclear solution (no nuclear solution exists according to his cherry-picked reading of the ANSTO submission to his review. See my post in the general thread on Finkel of Friday, 16 June 2017 8:06:36 PM. How has he not been called out by the media on this shenanigan?).The Review places utterly blind faith in development of viable storage, while placing all nuclear development in the same future basket as fusion.

Now we're reserving gas for Finkel's non-solution pathway towards storage. Most pollies seem too thick or bound up in PC to call him out on this steaming pile of horse$hit. The idea of a 3-year mandatory heads-up on coal-plant closure has to be a joke. He might just as well call for nationalization of all electricity generating assets to please the idiot ALP/Greens who support this bollocks.

Clean coal doable if geosequestration is abandoned in favour of natural sequestration! And for far less up front money!

Natural (smoke stack) sequestration (biodiesel production) has been trialled in Boston Massachusetts around a decade or more ago, and subject to further improvement, could work and without needing to charge consumers more!

The method requires investment in long clear plastic pipes which are filled with tower vacuumed, nutrient loaded effluent! Oil rich algae are introduced and allowed to reproduce and will as long as the endlessly renewed nutrient supply allows it.

Some algae will absorb as much as 2.5 times their bodyweight in carbon dioxide emission!

Algae will under optimised conditions double that bodyweight/absorption capacity, every 24 hours!

The trick is not to harvest any oil product until the absorption capacity exceeds the carbon production capacity of the coal fired plant. And then only from a surplus to sequestration requirement!

Obvious choices of algae are oil rich types that naturally produce biodiesel or ready to use as is jet fuel. Child's play to extract ready to use as is!

And given a ready, profitable market for both, able to significantly supplement coal fired power plant income streams.

Ideally the coal burnt will be supplied at cost, plus 10% by a employee co-op or government miner! Rather than a debt laden price gouging tax avoiding profit repatriating, asset stripping foreigner!

However, even with this endless supplementary income. The price of the annual millions of tons of mined coal can only ever rise.

Pollutants may include arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury and uranium!

Some of which can be retained inside the closed cycle system and removed as recovered industrial application minerals?

This alternative fuel production facility, could up the up front costs of a zero emission plant to as high as 7 billion, but increase the income capacity, well beyond the 50 year life, given the biodiesel/jet fuel production can go on almost indefinitely with routine maintenance, and atmospheric carbon extraction.

The same 7 billion able to fund the roll out of around 7 comparable zero carbon emission thorium power plants?
Alan B.

The most interesting part of this article is that it comes from someone who was involved in the NBN decision while recognising its flaws. The lesson Dr Jensen draws from that experience is that picking the best technology to achieve some stated objective is a mug’s game. That’s been proved more or less true for fast internet. Things are worse for primary energy and its refined form, electricity. At least the NBN had available one practical solution but, as others here have pointed out, erred in implementing it without due consideration that better solutions might or would turn up. That’s a reasonable expectation in the field of IT.

Not so with energy. Energy is different. OK, there are abundant claims that Australia, or the world, can run on various forms of low-emissions energy. Those claims are vigorously contested globally. No country has done it yet. Speculation and hype about renewables in particular are rife. It’s a big subject that can’t be resolved here. But one thing is certain. There is risk in assuming it will be done, ever, with sun, wind, nuclear, algae, trees, tide, CCS and all the other proposals that keep on coming.

So whatever the Finkel recipe for secure electricity with reduced emissions might now be, it is certain to start from the easy end, the modest reductions in emissions needed to meet present targets. For example, cutting by around half while maintaining a secure supply of electricity is easy; just use gas. Beyond that level, and beyond electricity itself, we are in the land of the unknown, confident predictions notwithstanding. Nothing Finkel says helps. He offers an opening gambit without an endgame

Why lump nuclear into your dream list, Tombee? It's been working for 60 years in France, as one example.

If you mean the public won't buy it well that's not something Finkel should concern himself with as a scientist. His job is to clarify, not stultify nuclear energy as a possible solution. His own leanings have hopelessly compromised his review paper.

After the enormous upheaval of getting us off old coal and eshewing ultra-super-critical coal-power, Finkel's recommendations will have moved us barely an inch towards tackling AGW, even if the whole world followed his advice. The dream of a plentiful viable storage end-game is just that, a dream.

Luciferase misinterpreted my mention of nuclear. I was referring to the fact that nuclear energy initially converts to heat which is then used to generate electricity. Electricity now represents around 40% of the world’s use of primary energy. I see no reason why nuclear couldn’t supply all of that. The other 60% mainly goes into heating, transportation and various industrial processes. I was referring to that 60%. Some of those applications could be readily electrified, others not so readily. And there’s a good slab (no-one seems to have done a proper analysis) for which there are no suitable technologies. So we are a long way from a fully electrified, and therefore fully nuclear, world.