To more directly address daggett's question as to land area required for solar pondage in relation to electricity generation, experience from the Pyramid Hill, Victoria, solar pond indicates around-the-clock generation of 60 Kw of electricity 365 days per year from a pond one third of a hectare in area. See: http://www.enersalt.com.au/Local%20Publish/html/cheap_heat__.html

Clearly, there exists the possibility to scale the generation capacity installed in conjunction with solar ponds so as to permit greater output per hectare at peak demand times, provided a corresponding reduction in output occurs at off-peak times. Such amplification of generating capacity would seem relatively easy to progressively achieve, given the modularity of organic rankine cycle engine/generator units.

If solar pondage was to be initially managed as a peak demand matching capability generating electricity only, say, 10 hours in every 24 hour period, the output per hectare, based on the Pyramid Hill experience, could be around 432 Kw. Expressed slightly differently, around 2.32 Ha of solar pondage would be required per Mw of peak load time generation capacity.

By way of comparison, the Tarong coal-fired power station has a generating capacity, I understand, of 1,400 Mw. Let us say that peak demand for 10 hours out of 24 threatens to outstrip installed capacity by 30%. That would be equivalent to 420 Mw of peak period generating capacity. That 420 Mw peak demand, met from solar pondage managed so as to supply peak demand only, would require around 975 Ha of pond surface.

If you wanted to generate 1,400 Mw of base load electricity around-the-clock, you would require around 7,800 Ha of pondage. Not beyond question, here and there, in salinity affected parts of Australia, so far as land availability is concerned.

Of course, this would become to be a source of power with pride, and as such is completely off-topic here. And I must get back to my CBD penthouse from where I can catch up on what my capital wind farms are doing.

Forrest, I meant to thank you for your earlier helpful reply and links.

I would like to (but may not find the time to) write an artcle based upon it at http://candobetter.org, if that would be OK with you?

There have been quite a few false solutions proposed to humankind's overall predicament of overpopulation and growing resource scarcity. (Two obvious examples being nuclear fusion and bio-fuels (see http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2008/12/02/a-long-recession/comment-page-3/#comment-222915))

It seems from the way you have described it, this proposal would actually help us, rather than make things worse.

Nevertheless, we should not use such technical innovations to put off necessary measures to stop further population growth and to reduce humankind's consumption of natural resources (which is what are political leaders stupidly allowed to happen after the commencement of the unsustainable fossil-fuel driven Green revolution of the 1960's and 1970's).

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FG, have you been following the "9/11 Truth" forum, lately?

It looks as if our good friend Paul.L may have finally, after 380 posts posted to that forum, spat the dummy:

"Dagget,

"As I said, MORON. I continually show how little grasp you have of this subject and you just pretend it hasn't happened.

"I'm not interested in debating this with you anymore ..." (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166#52342)

Let's hope it's for good this time and that if I do decide to follow up any of the dozens more loose ends he has left lying around that he will stand by his undertaking not to be 'baited' into coming back.

The more Forrest thought about solar ponds, the better he liked them.

It was fine having wind turbines, but there was a limit to their scope. In his own case, Forrest knew how exceptionally fortunate he had been to have got a large government supply contract at a fixed price indexed to inflation. Newer entrants to the wind game faced having to deal, increasingly, with large privatized base load power enterprises, enterprises that were disinclined to pay the smaller wind energy investors very much for their non base load power. Unless these newer wind-farming entrants had also somehow obtained long-term featherbedded contracts at the outset, they were destined to be price-takers, not price-makers, in the national electricity market.

There was also the limitation as to the proportion of total demand that wind-generated electricity could meet. 'Balancing the grid', and all that. Wind turbines had little prospects independent from a grid, but were just price-taking satellites of those who owned the base load generating assets on that grid.

Solar ponds, by contrast, enjoyed the best of both worlds: they could be connected to a grid and supply not only base load capacity but a fairly rapidly deployable peaking increase in output, or they could operate standing alone in remote or not so remote locations providing round-the-clock electricity with virtually no transmission losses.

There was a third world potential for solar ponds. Their ability to be able to utilize salinity affected land, and the construction and management techniques related to them, was serendipitously synergistic with the likely requirements for the large-scale farming of oil algae in Gert-by-Sea. Forrest liked the idea of both being in power, and getting into oil. In a very democratic way, of course.

Finally, solar ponds were a bit like Linux in the computing world: they, as a concept, were non-proprietary; any Tom, Dick, or Harry could quite legitimately build and operate them without having to license the technology from some neo-feudal corporate overlord.

Forrest thought he'd get Dick to help build some ponds.

Forrest looked at the photos of the Pyramid Hill solar pond. "That's a lot of plastic! I hope Dick has access to lots of plastic: it will make the diversification into on-demand peak-load power supply that much easier and more viable" Forrest said to himself.

It was just as well Forrest saw these sights and thought these thoughts, and then wrote them down, for he had noted that it had been 17 days since anything had been posted to the 'Power without pride thread', and it was within a day of going dead. That would never do! There was so much more to be said, let alone done, on this topic. Have to keep the 'gamelifters' on their toes, and give the priests of DEUS something to do. It would be a shame for the topic to be archived so soon, all just in order to prevent some incognito poster from necroposting libel in some long forgotten thread. "Why didn't they do their libels up front where it counts?" Forrest asked himself, and others. "Self-defeating, if you ask me" said Forrest to himself, at the same time noting that nobody had so asked.

Dick had seemed to have been a bit pre-occupied of late; something to do with legal problems or litigation, Forrest thought. Forrest wondered whether Dick's legal problems had been deliberately fabricated by other parties just to keep Dick's attention off any foray he might otherwise make into water conservation, or power, or, heaven forbid, both! In Forrest's opinion, many proponents of renewable energy who had great expertise in hopping the government gravy-train felt threatened by Dick, simply because he was so good at what he did. And hey, opinion was what it was all about, right?

There was shortly going to be $500 million of taxpayers' money up for grabs under the Renewable Energy Fund. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2372#52921 Forrest and Dick might collar it all. That would scatter the corporate behemoths like the charge at Beersheba scattered the Turks!

That other long running forum "9/11 Truth" http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=0 the longest running on OLO as far as I can tell, has been quiet for a few days. I still have more to say, so I will be sure to make sure I post before it is disabled.

Forrest had got the horrible feeling that the Renewable Energy Fund, sourced from the Ozzian taxpayers, was in reality intended as nothing more than a subsidy for trans-national oil corporations and the like to help emplace them as major, if not monopoly, players in the Ozzian electricity market. As near to an absolute and direct betrayal of the electors as you could get, when it is considered that in large measure the Ozzian public already, and for long time past, owned outright the generating capacity and constituted a very large part of the end-market for the product, electricity. THAT really would be an exercise in power without pride.

Right on topic if it was true, but could it really be that brutal a betrayal?

Forrest wondered whether the general run of Lablib and Liblab pollies, be they already elected or but yet only aspirant to such status, had had it explained to them that the mug public could be so inconvenienced by degraded conditions of service and supply with respect to electricity that they could be charged by 'privatised' utility corporations much, much more per KwH for supply than any publicly accountable enterprise could ever get away with charging. This envisaged situation would of course be very good for the 'private' corporations that would be effectively granted a government monopoly, from which advantageous 'commercial' situation significant funding could be derived with which to provide quite a rewarding 'career path' for all ductile pollies henceforth, in due course, conditional upon 'good behaviour'.

The other little side-benefit of handing-off the public assets associated with electricity supply to 'privatised' utility corporations was, for the class of ductile apparatchik pollies of either principal sort, that they, as pollies, would be able to publicly wash their hands of accountability for the degradation of service and/or the cost of maintaining supply. That would no longer be a politician's responsibility. Pollies could be free to scatter what largesse may remain in the public coffers in support of other 'causes'.

Today provided an example of service degradation. There had been load-shedding.