Shadow Minister,

Wind power may indeed be considered a mature technology and may eventually begin to see diminishing returns. Nevertheless it *is* a cheap and universally-available non-fossil-fuel electricity generating technology, so there is no good reason not to pursue deployment of wind power up to the economic limits of its penetration, eg. to 20% of electricity production in any network.

Other mature renewable technologies are also comparably cheap wherever there is a suitable resource available: traditional geothermal power, hydroelectricity (including newer but no-less-efficient micro-hydro) and biomass power from agricultural or forestry wastes, are all price-competitive even with coal.

This cannot be said of all renewable power technologies; the most promising *are* in their infancy and *are* showing rapid cost improvements, as are the kinds of power-storage technologies which will be needed to permit intermittent renewables to come into their own.

Solar PV has a venerable history but is making impressive strides in commercial development. Wave and tidal power are about where wind was in the early 1980s -- barely beginning to be used for electricity production, nowhere near competitive with established technology, but they promise comparable progress to that which wind has achieved in the last two decades. Liquid biofuel technology may be 200 years old, but it is in its infancy when it comes to commercial development as a competitor to petroleum.

Australia already has wind farms, wave power systems, micro-hydro systems, solar systems, deployed and expanding and connected to the grid and earning money. We have several companies pursuing hot-rock-geothermal prospects. Other Australian companies are deploying promising wave and solar power technologies on the other side of the world. On the other hand Australian nuclear power is still all talk.

Remind me, when was a nuclear power station last completed on time and on budget, anywhere in the world? Let alone in a country that had never before used nuclear power?

News for you. People are building wind turbines and installing solar power equipment in Australia *right now*. They will produce electricity right away and make an immediate financial return.

Try that with a nuclear reactor.

"If they do not return the rods they get no more fuel."

Let's hope we are not dumbing down that prospect.

The non-return of fuel rods has the potential to create an international crisis.

Dickie,
My understanding of the proposal by someone who should know is
that the fuel rods for power stations would have to have a lot of
processing to make them weapon suitable and that many times the amount
of power fuel consignment is needed for a weapon.
So once the reactor is fuelled they can only replace the spent fuel by
returning it.
The situation is the same as now, but they do not have to return the
fuel. The whole process can be monitored by the IAEC including the
shipment and storage of waste.

I am assured that it could be made leak proof.

Xoddam,

I see that we concur on wind power. It is definitely the most efficient source of renewable energy, and when it is situated near the point of consumption, then it can come close to the cost of non renewable sources of power. However, when far from the point of consumption, the reticulation costs can be several times the cost of the generation. I would expect the contribution from wind to be higher than 20%.

The other technologies:

Sun: the next best choice, but still expensive, and of limited use at peak demand at 5pm-7pm. Maybe 10%

Hydro: 0.1% would be optomistic in Australia.

Wave: Also not a new technology. The main failing is that no wave generation system has survived the once in 10 year storm or waves and are normally beaten into scrap metal.

Geothermal: Limited to access to hot rocks close to the surface: I don't have firm figures, but I would guess slightly better than Hydro.

Biofuel, a) reuse of waste material - very cost effective, in waste dumps, sugar mills and pulp mills, but limited to maybe 0.5%.
b) specially grown biofuels, extremely expensive.

As for storage, the only cost effective method presently is the Hydro scheme, others are 10s to 100s of times more expensive and not even close to being feasible in our lifetimes.

With regards to the cost and time over runs of nuclear, these are predominatly due to "green" obstruction tactics.

Wind and solar generation being installed presently only makes a profit with massive subsidisation far in excess of what the nuclear industry gets.

The only solar or wind generation that pays for itself on its own merits are ones installed at home where power is 20+c kWhr not 4c as on the grid. This is worth doing, but the rest are expensive window dressings.

Shadow Minister

The cost benefit of having wind or solar at or close to one's home is largely illusory, and is a result of the pricing structure. Even if large numbers of people were to install such systems, it would not reduce the network infrastructure required, because it would still have to be there for when there was insufficient wind or sun. Since less energy would be sold to the consumer, the price of the energy that is sold would have to rise to cover those fixed infrastructure costs. To avoid this amounting to a cross subsidy to people with wind/solar generation, strictly speaking the price change should apply only to them, though this would inevitably be characterised by greenies as a "tax on sustainability" so probably wouldn't happen.

This is analogous to the situation regarding non-intermittent generation whose fixed costs have to be covered even if they are producing less energy because they're sometimes displaced by intermittent sources.

I think you'll find that the believed geothermal (hot rock) resources are more than adequate to supply our entire needs for a long time, but this technology has yet to be proven.

While greenies have undoubtedly contributed to time and cost overruns on nuclear plants, I think that these are more often the result of first of kind risks. If the industry could settle on a design and build multiple incarnations of it, both the costs and construction times would come down.

Looks like we are stuck with nuclear power generation in the forseeable future if we want to close down our coal burning stations.

I see the Chinese have just contracted for six new Nuclear power stations. It is estimated that by 2050 China will need 350 gigawatts of nuclear power. That is something of the order of the current world nuclear power capacity. They are desperate to close down the coal burning system because of the atmospheric pollution in all the larger cities.

One would presume that India is heading in the same direction as the Russians have signed a deal to build four new nuclear power stations.

The incoming Labor government will have to move us in the same direction, even much against their will and the NIMBY attitude of the population. Fortunately, we have extended lengths of sparsely inhabited coastline, not yet occupied by the sea-change set, on which to site these stations.

David