Australia losing its great wind power opportunity
Wind power: European renewable energy expert warns Australia risks missing out on cheaper and cleaner electricity, ABC Radio, 16 July 15 AM By Michael Edwards A European expert on renewable energy says Australia risks missing out on a huge opportunity for cheaper and cleaner electricity if it does not encourage investment in wind power.
Oliver Joy, from the European Wind Energy Association — the peak body guiding wind power projects across Europe — said a huge shift towards renewable energies were underway in the continent with wind power leading the charge.
He said Europe was on track to get half of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind power by 2050 and had big ambitions when it came to reducing its carbon footprint.
The eurozone has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 95 per cent by 2050 and says this can only be done with all of its electricity coming from renewable sources, with wind power providing the lion’s share.
The Federal Government has ordered the Clean Energy Finance Corporation not to invest in wind farms, with Prime Minister Tony Abbott saying he finds the giant turbines “visually awful……..
Wind ‘cheaper than fossil fuels’
According to the European Wind Energy Association, wind power is a cheaper way to produce electricity than fossil fuels.
Mr Joy said it also had long-term savings for taxpayers.
“Cheaper than nuclear and gas and almost on a par with coal — that’s purely based on generating electricity,” he said. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/euro-wind-power/6620936
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of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 
Australia is lagging behind in SAFE Clean Energy because its Leaders are focused on MONEY and Control instead of what is best for all Australians.
The military program that produced the Atomic weapons used in Japan created “the nuclear power industry that began with Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program”.
Utilities have used these nuclear power plants to create 50 to 70+ year (design to decommissioning) income streams for themselves and their shareholders with little to no oversight by the ratepayers they keep in Energy Slavery with ever increasing Energy costs. It is no wonder that these Nuclear Utilities are doing everything they can to oppose the adoption of residential Solar, since Solar offers almost all their ratepayers a path toward Energy Independence (once their Solar investment is paid off), since they can then reduce their monthly Energy Utility bills as low as they want. Big Utilities are using their considerable Political influence to reduce, limit and/or eliminate all subsidies for residential Solar (Wind and PV) since those will only make it easier for ratepayers to “escape” Energy Slavery.
Residential Solar also offers its Owners the option to use their generated Energy for electric vehicles (eVehicles), which then eliminates having to pay for diesel or gasoline at the pump which includes large amounts of taxes. As an example, you can now buy a number of electric motorcycles that have a top speed over 80 mph, only cost about a penny a mile to operate and can be driven on the highway over 150 miles between charges! http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/motorcycles/
Larger eVehicles will also provide some Energy Storage options that were unheard of just a few years ago, since Energy Storage technology is now just beginning to become commonplace and it will also help revolutionize how ratepayers manage the energy they generate themselves.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2015/07/tesla-cto-bulk-energy-storage-will-grow-much-faster-than-people-expect.html
Snip
Tesla Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer JB Straubel who offered a vision for the future of energy storage and PV. Straubel believes that the energy storage industry is “right at the precipice” of massive cost declines like PV experienced. “The next decade is going to look very different because all of the demand [for energy storage technology] coming from stationary energy storage and from electric vehicles — from many different companies not just Tesla — will change the demand curve and slope in a huge way,” he said. “It’s kind of like the difference between solar used for pocket calculators and satellites VS solar used for buildings. The demand is orders of magnitude higher and puts it on a different trajectory for cost declines.”
To put it in numbers, Straubel believes that the demand for batteries coming from just his company will be something like 35GWh of energy storage by 2020. “That is more lithium-ion capacity than existed in the entire world in 2013.”
For all these reasons and more, Nuclear Utilities fear what is know as the “Utility Death Spiral” and it is no wonder that Energy investors have now shifted so much of their investment money away from Nuclear and toward “Clean and SAFE” Renewables like Solar and/or Wind Generation that no new nuclear reactors would be built without huge Government guarantees, despite what the cost of the Energy produced is or what voters/ratepayers want.
I predict that we are now seeing the last of the “Nuclear Age” which began about 70 years ago, since Nuclear is pricing itself out of the Energy Marketplace since the cost of Renewable Generation is dropping almost monthly and is predicted to continue to do so far into the future! Of course, like the dinosaurs of past ages, we will see them struggle as current economic conditions make it ever harder for them to compete. Since a major cost for business is Energy, expect to see them relocate to where Energy is the lowest cost (along with their good paying jobs) or simply generate their own Energy, like Google, Apple and others are now starting to in ever increasing numbers.
Parts of the above comment were posted here:
http://washingtonspectator.org/nuclear-age-began-70-years-ago/#comment-9860
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