World energy consumption is about 18 TeraWatts which is about 0.02% (one fiftieth of one percent) of the solar energy falling on the earth’s surface (87 PetaWatts, 87,000,000,000,000,000 W). Geothermal is another energy supply that, in scale, also defies human comprehension. One single green energy source (the largest in the world) is the Three Gorges Dam hydro scheme will ultimately provide up to 23GW (about two thirds of all of Australia’s electricity consumption). To be sure, harvesting some of these abundant energy sources will take effort, money and time. But no, none of this is feasible and according to Greg and his ilk we must be passive, fatalist and simply reconcile ourselves to doing absolutely nothing different to what we happen to be doing right now.

That’s 20-40c capital cost per kilowatt-hour per year.

A new 1GW coal-fired power station built today would have a capital cost on the order of $2-4 billion dollars and will produce a little over 8 billion kilowatt hours per year.

That’s 16-32c capital cost per kilowatt-hour per year.

Thus far, coal seems slightly cheaper.

But with coal-fired power, you have to buy coal. You have to find something to do with the ash. Coal mines and coal exhaust both have huge environmental impacts which must be addressed.

Wind turbines also benefit from being mass-produced in relatively small units, and there is next to no lead-time from construction start to power production. Big power stations take several years to build before they generate any electricity at all.

There’s a healthy debate about whether the cost of ‘firming’ wind generation brings its cost as a major contributor to the electricity supply as high as that of building new thermal baseload power stations. Estimates vary from a 100% premium (a gross exaggeration) to 1-2% (sheer optimism). The real figures for the marginal cost of adding wind power to an existing grid depend very much on local factors: how much variation the system already copes with, for instance; whether the peak wind times coincide with high or low demand; and whether hydroelectric or gas-turbine peaking power is readily available or installable. Only in places such as Denmark and North Germany where intermittent power already produces over 25% of the electricity in a region (ie. regularly exceeds the total local electric demand) are the costs of wind power becoming tricky to meet; but the challenge *is* being met creatively at a cost those countries consider reasonable. It’s a matter of accounting and cabling (eg. to Norway where hydro-electric backup can easily compensate for excess wind power) more than anything else.

“Base load power in major cities using renewable sources” — Why qualify with “major cities?” Most power from any source is generated some distance from cities these days, close to relevant resources like coal or water, and transmitted many kilometres.

“Base load”? Try Iceland, Norway, New Zealand, Brazil, Thailand, Russia, China, all of which generate huge amounts of power with the long-established renewables of near-surface, hydroelectric geothermal and hydroelectric power from dams.

Intermittent renewables don’t qualify for “base load” under most people’s understanding of the term, but that doesn’t make them significantly more expensive if the system is already designed to cope with a large variation in electric demand, as it is in most temperate countries with huge difference (over 50% in some cases) between daytime and nighttime or between summer and winter.

Hot-rock geothermal power will qualify very well for base load, as will solar thermal power with heat storage except in the dead of winter.

These technologies lack development (and therefore can’t yet be accurately costed), but not merit.

It’s not inexplicable. Big industrial energy consumers are postponing the necessary investments for energy efficiency as long as possible in order to gain the maximum possible windfall from gaming the ETS. If they improve efficiency before their free permit allowances are legislatively “locked in”, they would miss out on a massive handout.

If they had to purchase all their permits, there would be nothing to lose from investing now in more efficient plant technology.

Greg, it is certainly not cheap to shift away from a fossil-fuel based infrastructure, but in the case of electricity it is not particularly expensive: electricity generated by wind turbines, for instance, is no more costly than electricity generated from coal. Other fossil fuels are harder to replace than coal, but there are many ways to skin this cat. The technologies exist and the cost is one we could easily meet as we have met the much greater financial challenge of the recent credit crisis.

Talk of “struggling to feed ourselves” as a consequence of a shift in energy technologies is nonsensical scaremongering. In the long run this shift will make us far richer.

The environmental happy clappers who facilitated Rudd’s ascendancy in this matter are not prepared to sacrifice their standards of living on the basis of principle. How on earth can we continue to burn carbon-based fuel and expect third world countries to sell their ETS thisentitlements to us so that we can continue to live the high life.

Now that ultimate reality is dawning, the government is backpedalling as hard as it can to look after its union mates and it’s big corporate donors as a would be the first to suffer as a consequence of taxing high carbon use industries including coal, mining, transport, and ultimately food production and every other commodity dependent on fuel for transport.

Only a few in the audience can see that the emperor is naked, and the national preoccupation with sport and sopies will probably cause this situation to go unchecked for some time. Unfortunately there is no ground for the opposition to raise the stakes in this issue because anything done to try to redress this issue will only make them even more unpopular than the government would be if it actually implemented its own policies.