Peter K the reason that most countries are struggling to get past a minor percentage of renewable energy is the mind boggling cost especially to smooth out the peak and troughs. We need either a huge cost or performance breakthrough in renewables to be free of fossil fuels or nuclear. To take Australia's electricity production of about 46 GW (billion watts) peak let's say solar will be $5 a watt capital cost. We might want to treble that to cover for night time (no sun but less demand) and store say half of the annual daytime output as a buffer. However electricity storage for general applications is little advanced on batteries working out at about $200 per khw or $200m a gigawatt-hour. Some say batteries in electric cars could fulfill this role though that involves more expense.

Do the maths, allow for conservation but add in desalination, more trams etc and the numbers are horrendous. Maybe we could do it over 20 years assuming no technical breakthroughs but we needed to start yesterday. Despite the glaring evidence of high energy costs and climate dramas we will almost certainly leave it too late to avoid a crisis.

Agreed, we need an alternative ..

One of which is Nuclear Power, which is clean to produce and could also run Hydrogen plants to produce fuel for vehicle transport. It can also power desalination plants.

We still have to live with the waste, but we do that now with other fuel supplies, or why not lift it into space and send it into the sun. Sure we can't do that now, but maybe we could. Let's put some time into working through the problem of that waste.

It's not perfect, but what is .. at least its worth a go.

It won't produce CO2 - so keeps that side of the argument happy, if that's a problem for some folks.

All new dwellings should come equipped with own power supply. Dwellings already existing should move toward power independance. If every house in aus had 1 kw on the roof surely that must take a lot of coal out of the system.

Er hang on folks, its not all gloom and doom just yet :) Stuff
is happening!

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Dream-solar-system-HF6HW?OpenDocument&src=ea

Clearly there are cost competitive developments out there,
but they take time. But progress is happening, thanks to venture
capital, so the business community is not as fast asleep, as
you might think. Simply investing billions into r&d.

Next we have new vehicles happening:-

http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php

Tesla is showing the potential, much, much cheaper versions will
hit the stores from 2010 on, as nearly every MV manufacturing
company, is developing their version.

There is no need to reduce our living standards and there is no need to change our lifestyles because of Peak Oil. There is a need to invest in renewables but that is all we have to do.

There is plenty of renewable energy sources available in Australia not only for all our energy needs but the rest of the world if they want it.

Once you have a solar thermal or geothermal power plant built its running costs are half the cost of fossil systems (no fuel cost)

The cost of building a geothermal plant is currently about twice the cost of building a fossil burning plant but we know that every time
we double the capacity of any engineering system we drop its per unit cost by between 15 to 25%. The cost of geothermal (and solar thermal) will be the same cost as fossil burning plants within 5 to 7 doublings of capacity. We should be able to double capacity every 12 months.

Do the maths and you may be in for a pleasant surprise.

All we have to do is to keep building plants like geodynamics is doing with geothermal in the Cooper Basin and Ausra is doing with solar thermal in Arizona - both good Australian ideas and companies.

Pretty simple really.

Some details about what Ausra are doing. Sounds like it won't be
so long for them to start building here too.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Sunny-prospects-H8TJ2?OpenDocument&src=sph

So cheer up folks :)