@mudguts
MG i don't know what old chest nut you're talking about and given your woolly language i suspect you don't either.
i doubt it's the transition to renewable power generation because solar is very much the new kid on the block.
solar kills two birds with one stone: (1) it is central to the need to decarbonize power generation and shift away from coal and gas, and (2) the economics of solar are just going to slaughter fossil fuels, and prove more reliable.
but i'm not here to deconstruct your delusions because they're of zero consequence, and i don't have clinical quals.
that said, it's worth keeping in touch with what's actually going on, rather than what you imagine is happening or what you want to unfold.
and who better to find out from than Emeritus Professor of renewable energy engineering at the Australian National University, Dr Andrew Blakers.
he's quoted below in another article in reneweconomy.com, from Feb. 10, 2023, in a piece written by Giles Parkinson.
"One of the four Australian solar researchers who have won the world’s most prestigious engineering prize says it won’t be long before solar is at a cost level across the world where it will “wipe fossil fuels out of the global economy.
"The ANU’s Professor Andrew Blakers was this week announced as the winner of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, in a joint award with Australia’s “father of PV” Professor Martin Green from UNSW, and the husband and wife team Dr Aihua Wang and Dr Jianhua Zhao.
"Blakers, in an interview on the latest episode of RenewEconomy’s popular weekly Energy Insiders podcast, says that while Green has predicted a solar cost of $10/MWh, it won’t need to fall that far to push coal and gas out of the global economy.
"“I don’t know about $10MWh, it would be lovely if we got there,” Blakers said. “But we don’t even need to get anywhere near $10/MWh to be completely dominant – at $20 to $30/MWh solar completely sweeps the board against any other technology apart from wind. It wipes fossil fuels out of the global economy, and I think it’s highly likely that we will be in that range by 2030 in many places in the world.”
"The award for the four Australian researchers is a recognition of their work – and that of the teams behind them – in developing Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell (PERC) solar photovoltaic technology, which has now become the global standard and accounts for about 90 per cent of the world’s solar cell market.
"Decades of work lifted the efficiency of the solar cells by nearly two-fold (from around 14 per cent to 25 per cent) and in the process has taken the silicon solar cell – in the words of Blakers – “from a laboratory curiosity up to space, out to remote regions, and now a global Juggernaut, which is sweeping fossil fuels off the stage.”
"Blakers interests, however, now extend to far more than solar cells, and he has been active in looking at the electricity system as a whole, the resources and locations needed for wind, solar, transmission and storage, and their integration to create a cheap, clean, and reliable grid.
""It’s quite clear that a solar and wind dominated grid is going to be much more reliable than a fossil fuel dominated grid,” Blakers tells the Energy Insiders podcast."
....
Yo Mudguts, the writing is on the wall.
do try to keep up with developments lest you become another conservative anachronism, HC has plenty already.
