Europe is less windy than Australia? Only in a corporate puff piece.

Basically, what happens is that the first few spots they put wind turbines in are really good, around 40% load factor. But then as those get used up, you start having to use non-ideal sites, and start running in local planning problems, councils and residents and competition with other uses, and the load factor of those is pretty low. So that if wind makes up 10+% of your total electricity sources by kWh, the load factor is 20-25% for the system overall.

Anyway, like I said, you can quibble or fiddle with the figures a bit, but the basic picture remains the same: we can do a hell of a lot with a substantial portion of the federal and state budget surpluses we currently have. We don't need to raise taxes to fund renewables and mass transit and efficiency and so on, our current revenue is more than enough.

I mean, with our current revenue we couldn't covert the whole economy over in a few years, but even with zillions in money we couldn't do that because we'd be limited by technical skills and so on.

We don't need new technology (though it would certainly help), new revenue or anything like that. We just need to make the decision to do it. And we do it by one of two ways: either fund renewables to match fossil fuel funding, or else remove the subsidies for fossil fuels so that renewables get to compete on a level playing field.

I'm in favour of the second way, but apparently the world is full of fricking communist CEOs these days who think it's the public's job to fund everything they do, they shouldn't have to compete on the basis of normal market stuff. I don't really care how it gets done so long as it gets done.