I wonder if pumping liquids up when there is spare capacity and letting gravity bring them down to turn turbines to generate electricity later isn’t a pretty good storage system. Large pipes with low friction should allow what is in effect hydro-electric power to be pretty efficiently generated. Do you have some stuff on that?

I suppose one should feel grateful as electricity prices rise through mostly misguided government policies that we are rich enough for it not to matter and will perhaps get the flow-on unplanned benefits that we have got from inventiveness turned to the purposes of making war over hundreds if not thousands of years. Wind farms I suspect will, even if linked across a windy continent, never beat the blight-on-the-landscape downside with any worthwhile contribution to affordable and clean electricity. But solar, nuclear and battery technology show signs of moving fast and having a lot to contribute. This is the optimist’s way of looking at the dubious claims of those who the totally scientifically illiterate imagine to be authoritative “climate scientists” and those with AGW as the idol at the centre of their secular religion like Barry Jones and Phillip Adams. Their model hero may turn out to be Don Quixote rather than Winston Churchill but we will end up being able to cope with our inability to pay young women in the Third World to spend 10 of their fertile years getting an education and not bearing children (actually you’ld have to pay their fathers or extended families but even that is as likely as the next Pope recommending condoms for contraception).

Yes, storage remains the key - that, or reliable low-carbon baseload. You really need seriously industrial-scale facilities to run aircons off batteries.

Are you saying that the angle of the sun to the earth is beginning to change very rapidly around 4.30pm? But does that matter much if the solar collector is kept facing the sun or at least moved enough to counter the first couple of hours adverse changes? Of course we are going to be relying on better cheaper battery and perhaps other storage technology so a top of the batteries from midday to 4 pm might be enough to keep the air-con going till 11 pm….

Actually, not as good as you might think. Peak summer electricity demand loads (which are principally driven by aircons) generally occur around 4:30 pm - just as photovoltaic output is beginning to plummet.

PLCIEs aren’t worried about solar, for the reason you state - they’re much more concerned about gas and nuclear.

While not being particularly ‘anti-solar’, my concern is not for PLCIEs - it’s for both a safe climate and bringing/keeping as many people out of energy poverty as possible.

Might be the case that home solar’s not quite as useless as all that?

Somehow I has me doubts about some of the “ant-solar” numbers. I mean they’re very obviously concerned about “those poor little coal industry employees” (ho ho ho and a big pat of cow manure). But if solar is all that insignificant what have the PLCIEs got to worry about?

The average politician of any party 35 years ago could blandly repeat the nonsense about interest rates being too high and bemoan the [name a sum that seemed vast then] which would have to be paid by the poor home owner before his mortgage was paid off in 30 years time. Of course it was the poor saver who was receiving a negative real return after inflation that they should have been worrying about. They still over simplify of course (and not just for propaganda: they often believe what they say) but that is more likely to be obsessing about debt even when it is cheap and used for sound investments. Their nonsense is different. So, good to find you ahead of the field. Indeed it doesn’t pay to invest too early as my portfolio of potential 10-bagger tech stocks and blue sky small miners remind me…..[and that’s the ones I think will come good].

I can remember Liberals, including at least one Liberal MP who was a scientist, being enthusiasts for solar power about 35 years ago. However Howard, pre-middle-class-welfare, may have listened to economists and MBAs who could do their discounting sums and knew the value of a dollar now as against a dollar in X years time. What would Australia have gained from enormous enthusiasm by government for solar (better than wind certainly) before the 80 per cent recent reductions in the price of solar panels thanks to Chinese mass production? I remember Craig Emerson (yes Julia’s Craig Emerson) pointing out on Q&A or some such program a few years ago that solar power was many times as costly as coal fired power….

As for Denmark’s wind industry…. where does it get its electricity from when the wind isn’t blowing? From coal fired generators in Germany. And wind ain’t solar. Solar will, one hopes, be the main source of power in the long run. And then we will be resenting all the ugly windfarms with high maintenance costs and even more requirement for storage than solar.

But more applause for his not getting into the “climate science” debates when he knows he isn’t qualified and doesn’t want to waste his time mastering the vast research literature. He can do that when he is retired like the medical worthies who say far more than they know on the subject, Paul Nurse, Gustav Nossal, Peter Doherty, David de Kretser all come to mind….

0.1% of Australia’s electricity.

Hmmm.

Green ‘points to Germany to show what policy continuity can do for solar’. And what has solar done for Germany? 3% of their electricity.

No doubt Green is brilliant at what he does, and the world is a better place for his work, which has come an enormous distance technically. But on present indications it’s hard to see it amounting to more than minor steps on the road to the required decarbonisation rate.