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TOD spreading like a rash, I see...
G'day to you Gav from Pommieland, and congratulations. The colour scheme looks suspiciously like a rugby shirt!
I would be interested to see posts on the development of solar electric in Australia. You've certainly got the flat desert for it and it seems a natural for Oz, better than wind power. After all, the sun comes up every day but the wind doesn't always blow.
This from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_array :
In the Sahara desert, with less cloud cover and a better solar angle, one can obtain closer to 8.3 kWh/m²/day. The unpopulated area of the Sahara desert is over 9 million km², which if covered with solar panels would provide 630 terawatts total power. The Earth's current energy consumption rate is around 13.5 TW at any given moment (including oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric).
Australia could be shipping terawatts of electricity as far as China using high voltage DC power lines. The opportunity is vast. Will it happen? Ha! Instead we are going down because the politicians don't know how to change a light bulb.
Comments about rugby are forbidden until we start winning again (which may be a long time the way things are looking at the moment). Cricket is OK.
I'm very big on solar thermal power (and HVDC) in Australia - its a shame the present government isn't. A couple of old examples from my regular haunt :
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/08/nullarbor-solar-project.html
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/09/ausra-shining-brightly-over-pacif...
Ideally the whole planet will eventually be hooked up as per the old GENI (global energy grid) idea, with CSP{ doing the heavy lifting from the most optimal regions (off the top of my head, South west USA, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Northern Chile ?, Angola ?, Central west Australia and somewhere in Asia I won't even guess at - see a global solar intensity map to get the idea). Then augment with other renewables also picking the sweet spots - wind, wave and geothermal mainly.
Tonight we just had the TV debate between Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition leader Kevin Rudd. Not a mention of Peak Oil. Yet Peak Oil will kick Australia's economy in the guts - mining, tourism, broad acre farming and transport. We need to start investing in a Solar-Electric near future.
The CSIRO (Australia's scientific body) said 15 years ago that give them a decade and the funding and they could put the full national grid on solar - including overnight baseload power. The solar-thermal argued for here. Sadly some of our best solar energy scientists have left for California and Germany of all places has far overtaken this nation's previous lead in solar.
Howard has been in the pocket of the coal industry and a close buddy of Bush. Rudd spoke softly of solar tonight but he did say significantly more than Howard, the problem is appearing too radical to Australia's 55% conservative constituency - you'd think with the crippling drought the penny would drop... At least he mentioned Australia's "green car" - hybrid - once.
The hope is Labor win and Garrett the former rock star and environmental activist as Environment Minister enacts a policy for the Solar-Electric future we need before high petrol prices sink our economy.