Antinuclear

 renewable energy will eclipse fossil fuel sources sooner than people had anticipated…..Australia’s biggest solar energy project now under construction.

Sun will set on fossil fuels, says expert, ABC Radio National, The World Today, Matt Peacock reported this story on Monday, September 26, 2011 According to the eminent Australian pioneer of solar technology, David Mills, the recent rapid pace of expansion of renewable energy generation has taken the experts by surprise.

It is Mills’ solar thermal company Ausra, which is now owned by the French energy giant Areva, which is behind Australia’s biggest solar energy project now under construction.

He told Matt Peacock that renewable energy will eclipse fossil fuel sources sooner than people had anticipated.

DAVID MILLS: The United States and Europe for example, the amount of capacity added in renewables for the last two years has exceeded that of conventional energy.MATT PEACOCK: But that’s just new capacity added. They still have their base load power supplied by good old coal.DAVID MILLS: Well, that’s correct but you don’t have to do that for too many years especially at a growth rate of 30 to 50 per cent before you are the majority.

MATT PEACOCK: You’re saying solar and wind will very soon provide the majority of power in places like Europe?

DAVID MILLS: Absolutely. The question is how do you do that because as we fully know, those are variable sources. They go on and off. The sun goes right off at night, how do you continue to keep the lights on and we looked at that in a paper recently for the United States market to see whether you could run from two variable sources. We chose the best ones – wind and solar – because they are very, very large and of course, clean.

We did an hour by hour study for a particular year, 2006, and we found that in fact, yes, you can run the entire economy without any blackouts for an entire year on just those sources. …..