This subsidy story keeps coming up. Just like the diesel fuel rebate to miners is portrayed as a subsidy. Please explain what subsidy you believe the government is contemplating.
I thought they were talking of a Federal government loan so that the government can force an open access railway line from the Galilee Basin rather than have the situation in Pilbara with multiple private lines. Oh and a lot of new jobs, taxes and royalties in those new mines, to pay for important programs we would nearly all like to see maintained.
$50 MW-hr is a lot higher than the average wholesale price of just a few years ago, so I would not be too adamant the cost cannot be recovered over a 50 year life of a HELE USC power plant. There are other outcomes like IDGCC plants producing Urea and other fertilisers for agriculture. In the interim the price of battery storage will continue to fall, whether we in Australia have a high RET or not. Long term I agree we will be using renewables, it is just the trajectory and timing to get there.
What is the advantage of being an early adopter, apart from virtue-signalling? Coal that is exported is not part of our CO2 emission commitment, any more than we get a share of the CO2 reduction for the uranium exported.
It is similar with NBN where we would be have been better served to wait a few years for 5g wires than drop >100 Bn on an election stunt to win young voters with a gold plated soon obsolete fibre to the premises architecture, that will be dug up in pieces by a generation of plumbers, whose children will ask why we ever installed fibre through people's gardens, using cable that cannot be detected from the surface, for the want of some foil sheathing.
I know that God put the coal, gas and Uranium in the ground and also gave us the intelligence to use it, but now so many climate scientists "know"that their models predict the doomsday scenario that pays their wages, provided they feed in the right carefully massaged data sets. He also gave us the sun and the wind which are exciting prospects as long term sources of energy but presently need heavy subsidies to compete.
