Concentrated solar thermal power looks good in the long run and Australia has a higher percentage of it’s land mass classified as having premium CST potential than any other continent.

But as somebody who has actually worked for a startup and currently works as an academic, the road from “great idea” to “saleable product” to “profitable company selling product” is a long and very winding road, and doesn’t always pan out.

So the plant lifetime cost of the built-in gas backup component is at most a fraction of the cost of a dedicated gas system.

In any event we cannot ignore the ongoing costs and risk of safe storage of nuclear waste and with this in mind a fractional cost for gas backup seems exceedingly reasonable.

I also mentioned the possibility of a fossil fuel fired backup system (or possibly hot rocks) which could supply heat into turbine during extended solar downtime.

The compatibility of CST (as compared with PV or wind) with existing coal or gas fired generation dramatically increases the power supply backup options, so we need to move out of the renewables are a sideline paradigm.

My comment about the network was illustrative, however to address your concern we do already have meaningful grid connection in the eastern states (where bulk of load exists). That grid already gives us significant geographical separation already to minimise risk of concurrent cloudout affecting distributed generation.

All that largely redundant spare capacity costs money, which pushes the cost up beyond where coal is.

The idea of a network similar to the TREC concept in Europe is fine in theory, but would require a huge amount of coordinated investment starting from where we are now.

If you have any specific information we can link to that would be helpful.

Thanks for the info about Cloncurry. I googled and found reports in the Oz and the SMH. It seems that they are using 50 10-tonne graphite blocks perched atop 15-metre towers, rather than molten salt. It’s not clear how much storage that would provide.

“We think targets are important because they do send a signal for the market and to the community, and they also give an impetus to government policy action,” she told ABC radio.

“We have also stated that we will consider very closely the advice from Professor Garnaut.”

There seems to be a apparent glaring inconsistency in your comments as follows:

1) You seem to deny the possibility that CST can store energy on the basis that of your claim that it is a “startup” technology.

2) And on the other hand you seem to promote nuclear apparently without concern for the unproven capacity for safe storage of waste for thousands of years.

3) And you seem unbothered by the fact that sequestration is unproven.

If you are prepared to take comfort in the vapour of the points 2) & 3) then dismissing the existance of actual functioning heat storage systems with CST is bizzare.

CST technology has been in use since the 1970’s and in principle is hardly more complex than Watts original steam engine. To characterise it as a startup and thereby dismiss its relevance is surprising.

Decades before we have a nuclear design acceptable to Australians the world will have Gigawatt scale CST systems with heat storage that will comprehensively demolish the ignorant belief that renewables cannot have a role in supplying a meaningful portion of baseload.

As I’ve also noted many times, what startups promise and what they deliver are two very different things.

Concentrating Solar Thermal has built in energy storage and is apparently directly cost competitive with coal today at GigaWatt size plants. The energy storage is achieved using molten salts at 565 degrees. This permits continuous generation during night and cloudy days, although one expects there would be an eventual limit. By distributing 25 CST Gigawatt plants over the continent and feeding them into a connected grid you would further reduce the incidence of concurrent cloudout. The CST turbines can be compatible with gas or coal for backup heating if necessary. CST heated steam could run into existing coal turbines, for a nominal efficiency cost as compared with a completely optimal setup.

Cloncurry is building a small (30MW) plant to be completed soon. CST is technology that could be in place decades before and more cheaply than the mooted 25 fission reactors could be built and without the long term toxic waste storage issue or the unproven CO2 sequestration and attendant risks.

Are you aware of recent papers suggesting peak coal may hit in 2070. These papers reveal the profound and disturbing unreliability of previously accepted figures suggesting we have centuries of coal in hand. Proper accounting for the possibility of peak coal undermines the expected payoff from investment in CO2 sequestration.

Your implied assumption that the alternatives are going to be any more acceptable in cost is in my view unjustified.

Plus given the current issues associated with Desal plant in wonthaggi and dredging of the bay - good luck!

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Even if we meet the 20% renewable target by 2020, we’ll still have 60-70% energy from coal (the balance from gas). By 2020 the ETS will be in force and carbon price will be making Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) commericially viable.

If we don’t get CCS working, then the cost of buying permits under an ETS may seriously threaten the viability of many energy providers (unless they get enough free permits). Which is not an option Govt wants to entertain, hence the funding into these new CCS technologies.

Some of which are outlined here and as they are at large demonstration stage, could be put into practice by 2020 say.
Which of course still too late in some ways, but solar and wind will simply not pick up the slack in the interim.

I use the term ‘arable land’ given the percentage of the continent we inhabit that is entirely unsuitable for both crops and plantations, unless we have worked out a way to do this in a large collection of deserts. Bear in mind that the more energy we trap around our planet the greater the likelihood of alteration of existing weather patterns and the frequency, location and violence of adverse weather events. If we blow through any tipping points that local conditions over our plantation - average and peak rainfall, how much cloud cover it receives, if the climate changes and the temperature variation takes that plantation out of its peak efficiency zone as a carbon sink, in fact if just about anything changes on that land at all, we will need a plan B. It’s not just - it might burn down in a fire - there are a whole bunch of things that will affect the sinks performance (and god help us if we manage to push, say, the GBR out of its optimum efficiency).

As for beef - well, you could pick anything that shows up near the top of usage - beef, cotton, aluminium, cars, whatever. I think we need to work on the wisdom of ‘if’ they ‘could’ operate as a sink ‘in future’ given that we are looking at things to bring us under in a relatively short term scenario. I think we - species level ‘we’ - are likely to go over despite any other efforts and given this there is space for ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ on measures that push us towards blowing it. We might discover magical moon rocks that fix all our problems. We might find that penny wong has the wizard’s sleeve. There is perhaps a case to be made for at least dropping subsidies that are not tied to reduction in emissions from industries, animals, crops, etc, that are currently, well, just killing us long term.

I think the educated, conscientious, long term planning consumer is an endangered beast and one that we have a few industries dedicated towards eliminating altogether. Don’t depend on that guy, he’s a total bastard.

I guess I was imagining “small” and “big” farms in terms of differences in farming practices, but I guess the economies of scale trump that.

Russian scientists are predicting a new ice age, a Dalton minimum based on loweer solar activity.

And like all political schemes the carbon taxes, when they finally get rolling are going in the wrong direction. Har.

The USA is not falling for such stuff - at least in a big way.

Not only that. We may be bringing in Fusion a lot sooner than ITER contemplates:

WB-7 First Plasma