Dear Aiden,

You opine;

“Stop whinging about Luciferase's research. Nuclear industry lobbyists are better sources of information than the politicians that many others here blindly swallow the lies of. If you object, challenge the content not the source!”

If you take the time to read my post to individual and to properly comprehend my point you will see it was primarily directed at his lack of attribution.

If people are going to copy and paste that is fine but attributing the source is not only the proper thing to do it also negates the rather serious charge of plagiarism.

This may well not be something you particularly care about which is fine but I do and I will call it out whenever I see it.

Dear Hasbeen,

Put a sock in it mate I did directly address the point made by Shellenberger. What more do you want?

Fester, how do you recharge the battery if the next day is overcast ?
But then what if the NEXT day is overcast ?
How do you cope with a week of overcast days ?
I have personally noted five heavy overcast days in a row.

Hi Bazz,

I was trying to calculate a really low figure and still got a result over twice that of nuclear! I think if I could get Aidan to do a costing he would realise that his claim of renewables being cheaper than coal is total rubbish. If I had used the estimates from the CSIRO report Aidan linked, the cost estimate would have been higher.

By the way, "capacity factor" is the important term for linking different energy sources, and that isn't the end of it. I think that 80% is the capacity factor for coal, but because nearly all of the downtime is planned it does not require the multiple overcapacity of renewables.

https://www.wind-watch.org/faq-output.php

From the link:

<Two studies in Germany projected that 48,000 MW of wind power will allow reducing conventional capacity by only 2,000 MW, a 4% capacity credit>

You can see how generous are the assumptions I am making.

Seriously Aidan, have a go (anyone else for that matter). Use solar, wind, solar thermal, hydro, nuclear, batteries, any mix you please, and cost 2gw of 24/7 CO2 free energy supply. (Hint: go nuclear)

Fester, I think the multiplication factor is an educated guesswork
no matter who does the guessing. I proposed that the factor should be
one days consumption times (the number of overcast still days) plus 1.
However by using the whole country to spread the wind and solar farms
around the country you can chase 100% performance.

I suggested a CSIRO modelling using weather stations wherever good
wind sites are located, connect all to the internet, solar farms also
then also feed in live data on consumption by state.
Then shuffle wx stations onto better sites or extra sites until the
number of turbines adjusted until virtual generation equals demand 100%
for 24/7/52 !

Then virtual batteries can be inserted into the network.
After all that the cost would be pretty obvious.

Bazz,

The Chinese and South Koreans are building nuclear for 3 to 5 USD a watt. The figure the CSIRO released had to pass through a Neo-Marxist editing process.