yes a rant, but an excellent rant Scarpa.... the complexity and irony of our current energy system , as you allude to in your post 3+ years ago, is due to idiots trying to protect their own interests in energy production.
using coal as an energy source is a simple deal: dig up the rock, carry it to the coal burning electricity power station and burn it to produce steam, and dump the ashes/slag onto hectares of land at the back of the plant and forget about the leeching of toxic residues into the soil. gas too is relatively simple but more polluting overall as gas needs to be concentrated before transporting, or pumped into long steel pipes. and so less industry is involved and hence higher productivity per Kj at the superficial level.
whereas, as you rightly point out, solar, wind and other forms of electricity production and storage are seen as much more industrialised and polluting, forgetting of course the greater problems with coal and gas emissions.
yet renewable energy and storage, even vanadium batteries, are far less dangerously polluting and far cheaper than the heavy financial and toxic cost of inefficient coal and gas. but coal and gas are protected industries - a legacy of decades of use and preferential treatment.
there are many comments I'd like to make to your post but I'll restrict it to 2 key matters: 1. the imperative of global warming is greater today that it has ever been - with the global average temperature now having broken the 2o above pre-industrial average temp we face even greater danger from increasingly severe weather systems, the cost of which will exceed any savings we make by maintaining coal and gas use. and 2. energy production and storage chemistry can be far less polluting than is the current case. the Govs just need to regulate development and technology far better. an example of which is vanadium flow batteries - why use vanadium when other flow batteries which don't need such processing and polluting residues are available, eg. Redflow (ASX:RFX) (yes I hold RFX shares), eg.2 solar thermal energy using NaCl as a storage chemical, eg.3 pumped hydro energy storage (Genex).
the legacy of 9 years of obfuscation and delay by the LibNat Govs has left Aus in a hell of a problem. we would be way ahead of the curve had Howard's cap and trade been commenced, or Gillard's GHG reduction methods remained in force. but here we are stuck with the Albanese Gov supporting increasing coal and gas production and not doing enough to assist the transition to renewable energy.
where to from here is anyones guess. our politicians, focused as they are on maintaining the status quo while inadequately promoting the necessary infrastructure changes needed, are too subject to popular and industrial pressures. meanwhile our costs continue to rise and will likely continue to rise over at least the next 5 years before we begin to see electricity costs fall with the failing of coal and gas fired turbines.
