Antinuclear

Nuclear and fossil fuel industries losing their power to stall renewables

….soon enough it will become clear that there is an underlying technological inevitability at work.   It is the failure of Minister Ferguson to accept that inevitability that led to his renewables programs being taken off him by Senator Christine Milne and the Greens..

… Minister Ferguson chooses to instead use data put out by a US electricity industry think tank. This think tank, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is mostly funded by coal and nuclear firms.

Growing a healthy Australian renewables industry, The Drum, Dan Cass, 8 July 11“……….For many years the solar and wind industries have allowed themselves to be given the run around by successive governments. Ministers would ‘freeze out’ renewables companies that advocated publicly, yet give the coal industry everything it wanted.

Guy Pearce, a former Liberal advisor, blew the whistle on this political corruption, whereby the fossil fuel industry had improper influence over both major parties and the public service…..

ARENA [ the new Australian Renewable Energy Agency] will have an independent structure and this should give it the ability to work constructively with the solar and wind and other renewable sectors.

……soon enough it will become clear that there is an underlying technological inevitability at work.
It is the failure of Minister Ferguson to accept that inevitability that led to his renewables programs being taken off him by Senator Christine Milne and the Greens.

The US department of energy – hardly a bunch of Greenpeace radicals! – is so confident that solar can be as cheap as coal, without subsidies, that it is funding the development of technologies that can achieve this by 2020.

Minister Ferguson still has the grim view of renewables that he has had for 20 years, telling an industry magazine this year, “I am very firmly of the view that a price on carbon is going to create a huge growth opportunity for gas. It is really the only form of alternative clean energy in Australia at the moment…”……

According to U.S.  energy secretary Chu’s NREL, solar PV and solar thermal baseload can be around $100/MWh. This is about the price of coal generation and when solar is that cheap, it will not need any subsidies to beat coal in the energy market.

Unfortunately, Martin Ferguson is so prejudiced against the Greens that he cannot accept they are right about solar. In fact, he is so blinded by ideology that he fails to even hear the solar industry. The best example of this blindness is in the choice of cost projection data used by Ferguson to design solar programs.

While Chu’s NREL is predicting solar can get to the magic cost crossover point of about $100/MWh by 2020, Minister Ferguson chooses to instead use data put out by a US electricity industry think tank. This think tank, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is mostly funded by coal and nuclear firms…

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2787108.html

July 9, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics