Lino

There are ways of storing heat efficiently and solar thermal can store heat during the day for use at night so it can be used for base load. Geothermal obviously is base load.

The running costs of geothermal and the solar thermal are about 1 cent per kwh (ignoring capital costs). The running costs of coal are at least 2 cents per kwh. The capital cost of geothermal and solar thermal is about 3 times the capital cost of the cheapest dirtiest coal. Depending on the discount rate both geothermal and solar thermal are competitive today. Both geothermal and solar thermal produce at least two orders of magnitude more useful energy than it takes to construct.

"this is not the majority of Australia's farm land."

Actually Lino, most of Australian agriculture is still dryland
and does not rely on irrigation. Most meat is still produced
by livestock grazing grass and clover based pasture rotated
with cereals/canola is the way its done. We export most
of that grain/meat, so people like you never see it.

Alot of our farmland does very little but have sheep on it,
growing wool. Producing biomass and other potential biofuel
energy crops, does indeed have lots of potential for agriculture
in Australia, to provide its own energy. In this respect we
are far better off then agriculture in other countries, which
are far more intensive and more reliant on oil.

Nobody is claiming that biofuels will "replace oil", mearly that
its one of a myriad of methods we can use to provide future
energy. Stop looking for one magic bullet.

Fickle Pickle

Your figures on geothermal energy make me want to run out and build one now, however, my research reveals:

"The idea of extracting energy from hot dry rock originated in the United States 30 years ago and since then, 400million dollars has been spent on developing the technology world wide. The research programs have now stopped in the United States and the United Kingdom but investigations are still underway in France and Japan.

Overseas the programs have failed to extract the energy economically for a range of reasins including poor rock structure, low water flow rates or low rock temperatures. Professor Rahman believes Australia's hot rocks have the right temperatures and geological structure to succeed. But this is yet to be proven. Another potential hurdle for hot dry rock is its thirst for water. A small five megawatt plant would use eight and a half megalitres of water per day, which is about five olympic swimming pools and a full scale commercial plant would use ten times that amount."

Which would indicate that geothermal energy in Australia is not yet technically possible and even if possible likely to use most of its electricity to desalinate the water it needs. A serious dud if I ever saw one.

Democritus

I certainly hope you are wrong as I am investor in geodynamics www.geodynamics.com (btw so is Origin Energy, The ANU, ANZ, Citicorp etc). They are drilling their third well and have almost finished stage 1 of a three stage process. Stage 3 in their words will

Stage 3 involves the scaling up to a commercial plant in the order of hundreds of megawatts. A study of a 300MWe development requires a total of 37 wells (16 injection and 21 production) and constructing a power line from Innamincka to the national grid. The total cost of the station, including both underground and surface development is estimated at $770 million, total electricity costs are estimated to be between 4 and 5 cents/kWh, whilst operating costs are estimated at less than 1 cent.

They have found with their first two wells that the rocks are more porous than first thought but better still there is a lot of water already there. There is more than enough heat in the rocks to keep Australia going indefinitely.

As a backup we have solar thermal. Take a look at another Australian initiative that is being financed out of Palo Alto http://www.ausra.com/ This will deliver energy for about the same price as Geodynamics and they have also solved the heat storage problem so that their plants run all night.

Things are happening and really there is no excuse not to do it.

*Take a look at another Australian initiative that is being financed out of Palo Alto http://www.ausra.com/ *

FP, thanks for the interesting link! It just goes to show the role
that smart venture capital can play in financing these developments.

Vinod Khosla is clearly becoming a major player in the alternative
energy stakes, he also plays an important role in the biofuels
industry.

http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9811702-54.html?tag=nefd.lede

What I'd like to see is some enterprising Australians take this
kind of basic solar technology, as developed by Mills and come up
with a simple air conditioner, driven by steam, driven by solar.

Air conditioners are a huge power drain at peak power times and
are most required on days of maximum sunshine. Surely it would make
more sense, to convert that solar generated steam straight to
driving an air conditioner compressor, rather then first to
electicity, through a power grid, then back to homes?

Fickle pickle,

As the company is using gov funds to do the work, the risk is of lack of funding not lack of generation. I would not expect their promo page to say that it is a waste of money. However, it is very thin on technical details.

I reserve judgement until I see more than fluff.