Sorry; about the rewrite of the last paragraph, writing too quickly and did not edit.

Well ALTRAV my memory is of the Cain/Kirner government going into banking speculation and losing us our collective shirts.
The power companies have certainly run riot without any interference from the mostly Labour governments who worship at the green altar.
I am certainly with you on voting for independant members but my difficulty is so many are wolves in sheeps clothing. I confess I would still vote LNP if they plan to build about half a dozen plants producing cheap electricity but it seems unlikely.
Perhaps we need a very disparate sort of parliament although I dream of a commission set up to retrieve ill gotten gains. Like political and public service pensions, outrageous expenses and lets pull back public service salaries to a reasonable level.
No panel of ex PS or pollie, get someone like you or me on it and let us see how they fare?

J Bower, I think they will press on with Wind & Solar until some point
where the enormous cost of something like 15,000 wind and solar farms
installed and a grid to link them all to all the country sinks in.

Then it will be one group having twigged what they have let themselves
in for makes a sudden change of direction and goes for nuclear.
There will be a political war unlike anything we have ever seen.
We will not be able to get out of that war inside three year terms.
The construction time is many many three year terms.
One side in an attempt to get the country irrevocably committed to
wind and solar will bankrupt the country and collapse the economy.

There is absolutely no way that wind and solar as a total system can
be the cheapest energy source. All that talk is just the single
turbine and and solar farms them selves.
Batteries will be promoted but their cost would be very high if used
in an attempt to reduce the number of w/s farms.
The multiplication and grid costs drive them well above coal and or nuclear.

Apart from the question of reliability of renewables, they are not and will cost big time to keep them afloat.
Allan keeps championing thorium salt reactors.
From what little I know about them they sound like the answer.
Trouble is, it is so cheap to set up and run, the pollies can't see a decent cut or way to skim money from the bottom of the deck and into their back pockets.
Personally, I do not see these current options as 'real' contenders for the job.
I do not like wind farms nor solar farms.
The wind farms are the worst.
From my experience, the current technology is too mechanical, with too many moving parts, and I've learned that the more moving parts the more vulnerable and the more breakdowns and downtime the higher the maintenance the lower the reliability.
With the net result of a failed duty cycle and reliability of service,ie; blackouts.
And most importantly, it will not be cheaper than coal or nuclear.
All this BS could have been avoided if we put pressure on the pro-renewables movement to prove beyond any doubt that renewables were cheaper and more reliable.
They can't because it isn't and they can't again because it isn't, so I ask why are we making such a big deal about nothing.
Why?
Because some people are making a lot of money from it, that's why.
I have never believed or seen the evidence that will give rise to all these catastrophes we will be experiencing.
The ones we have seen are the Earths way.

The climate and anti-carbon dioxide hysterics still regale us with television images of clouds of ‘ emissions’, both black and white, spewing out of factory chimneys. We need to remind ourselves that this is STEAM not CO2, which is colourless.

The cost of a complete system, wind farms, solar farms,
grid substations towers and megavolt transmission equipment everywhere
will not be cheaper than coal or nuclear.
They lie when they imply wind & solar are cheaper.
Regarding maintenance that US study looked at maintence costs.
Bit of a shocker was that, taking into account solar panel guarantees
it would need about 100,000 solar panels would need replacing every day !
Of course that is for solar farms much bigger than we would need.
However the implication of such maintenance levels spread over such
geographically diverse areas would generate massive labour costs.

All that is why the government should instruct CSIRO to model the
whole the whole project with weather stations installed everywhere
that the wind looks promising.

If it finally shuts up the renewable lobby it would be worth it.
If it proves to be a goer, so much for the better.