BatteriesNotIncluded
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MediocrityNET: because people died for this!
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JONATHAN HOLMES: An agreement with at least one major Californian utility will be signed within weeks, they claim. Within three years, they expect to build a one gigawatt plant - more than three times bigger than the plants in the Mojave Desert. It'll cover thirty square kilometres of ground. A solar plant of that scale, David Mills claims, could make some of the cheapest electricity in America.
DR DAVID MILLS, CHAIRMAN, AUSRA INC.: If we build them small, they're very expensive. If we build them big, they're very cheap. So we expect that by the gigawatt scale these plants... I mean, it just pops out of the spreadsheets. These plants will be simply the same price in terms of electricity per kilowatt hour that a normal coal plant is in the United States.
JONATHAN HOLMES: All very well, say the sceptics. But solar power, even on a massive scale, can't offer base-load electricity, 24 hours a day.
JOHN HOWARD, PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA: Solar is a nice, easy, soft answer. There's this vague idea in the community that solar doesn't cost anything and it can solve the problem. It can't. It can't replace base-load power generation by power stations.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Mills and Khosla aim to prove that wrong. The technology to store heat, and release it later, so that solar stations can produce base-load power, is just around the corner they claim.
DR DAVID MILLS, CHAIRMAN, AUSRA INC.: Turns out this is actually quite easy to do. So we're very active in this. We'll be offering commercial storage systems up to, say, 24 hours within a year.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Up to 24 hours?
DR DAVID MILLS, CHAIRMAN, AUSRA INC.: Hm-hm.
VINOD KHOSLA, KHOSLA VENTURES: That's what's so exciting about David Mills' technology. It is the first thing I've seen in renewable power that can both meet the utilities requirements and meet the cost targets to be competitive and spread rapidly.
JONATHAN HOLMES: The potential for solar power in the vast deserts of Australia is almost unlimited. But David Mills has no plans to build here yet - not until the energy policy changes. "Neither solar thermal, nor any other low-emission technology", he says, "can compete with the artificially low price of Australian coal".
DR DAVID MILLS, CHAIRMAN, AUSRA INC.: Right now they're running coal plants, really at the marginal cost of the fuel, in Australia, not planning for the future and not factoring in the cost of new coal plant in that price. And, it means that a nuclear plant cannot compete with three cent coal, coal generation, a carbon sequestration coal plant cannot compete with that. So to get any of these clean technologies in, you're going to have to have a new price structure for clean energy.
source: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2007/s1898635.htm
*I'm still looking for the four corners interview with Malcolm Turnbull sharing "the lie"...but here is something relatively close for now!
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