Ah, I see. Personal attack. Good on you! Staying true to form for your team then. If you have anything intelligent to say I'm all ears - but as Aragorn said - "Today is not that day".

The "transition" from cheap and reliable energy supplies to wind and solar is driven by extremely costly subsidies. No energy has been produced without taxpayer subsidies anywhere in the world.

On top of these subsidies, it is going to cost $500 billion, according to the CSIRO, to send Blackout Bowen's "cheapest energy" to consumers from all the windmills and glittery panels littering the environment with their ugliness, through equally ugly and productive land-ruining pylons and cables. None of all this costly ugliness can guarantee us a non-stop, reliable source of electricity.

You beaut unreliables are going to cost us at least twice what the current system does.

And, when this crappy system can't provide power because nature won't cooperate with wind and sun, piss weak batteries costing an estimated 30% of GDP, and needing replacement every 10 years, will give us a brief flash of power for a few minutes.

People in the know think that 7 days of reliable storage would be needed to back up unreliable wind and solar!

Good luck to all of you still around when the shite really hits the fan.

Mad Max

Just noticed your "personal attack" whine. Telling me my comments are not "intelligent" is not a personal attack? Boofhead.

Overcharging EV's with Lithium Batteries at home often catches fire and burns the house down. This is a warning published within our village.

tritely taunting "boofhead" now,
Most comments on this board are not intelligent.
You don't have to take it personally.

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Fester,
>Your way of thinking about renewables replacing dispatchable power was commonplace a few years ago,
>but some very significant emerging problems have dampened the enthusiasm to the extent that renewables
>are now regarded as having a much smaller role in low carbon dispatchable energy generation.

Living in SA, I've observed the EXACT OPPOSITE!
Many people used to claim there were technical obstacles preventing the supply of electricity from renewables getting beyond a certain proportion of supply. But as the proportion of renewables increased, most of those obstacles turned out to be illusions, and the rest could be overcome without a huge amount of difficulty.

A few years ago I thought that the last 10% would be harder than the other 90%, and we'd probably always rely on them for production of electricity in difficult conditions, though the gas supply would gradually transition to non fossil sources. But now it's clear that the transition will be a lot faster: there'll be a large overbuild of wind and solar infrastructure, with the surplus power to produce hydrogen. A small proportion of that hydrogen will be turned back to electricity when needed. Of course since reliable supply is of very high importance, gas turbines will remain available for use long after we stop actually using them.

Hi Aiden,

I hope you are right, but the hydrogen economy has fundamental problems, principally the >80% energy loss. It would likely be better to store the excess energy by other means.

I think it rash to go headlong into an unproven system on a large scale, especially when nuclear has many decades of data proving it to be a cheap and reliable source of energy.

I used to get excited by the hype, but I have seen too many bs stories to get excited these days.