The UN welcomed Albo's commitment today. If anyone can achieve a 43% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030, Oz can.
(...vast sunny deserts and vast windy coastline, for a mere 25 million people).

I expect everyone around the globe will wake up, in the years ahead,  that public financing, not private,  will be necessary to complete the transition in a timely manner.

Meanwhile in Oz, hopefully the Greens will allow as much gas usage as is required, while we  transition  to green,  ASAP.

I think they will want to avoid the mistakes of a decade ago; and there should be no reason why we need to develop  NEW gas fields....

It will work, as Tim Buckley said today :the cheapest fastest NW energy in Oz is rooftop and grid upgrade.

Buckley would make a fool of you in 2 minutes flat.

thegreatdivide wrote on Jun 18^th, 2022 at 11:00pm:


Tim Buckley apparently knows finance. Also apparently he knows nothing of rooftop solar. Solar changes by the minute. It is not and cannot provide reliable energy.

Buckley, like you, knows nothing of engineering. He has Buckley's Chance or none.

Ah yes the pumped hydro that loses so much in pushing water up hill.

As I said Neither Buckley nor you know even basic engineering.,

Where is the scope in WA for pumped hydro? it is largely flat.

In signing off from Siemens Gamesa after three years that might diplomatically be described as ‘eventful’, I wrote to colleagues that: “I suspect it will get worse before it gets better, but it will get better”.

One of the first responses I received was very instructive: “When I joined more than 15 years ago, I was told that I was joining the sector with the brightest and most promising future. The problem is that it is a future that seems never to come.”

It is fair to say that that sums up much of the prevailing mood in the wind turbine OEM sector right now with all the major western OEMs struggling to turn a profit. It is not unusual to hear senior industry figures raising the spectre of the fate of the European solar manufacturing industry, long ago lost to the east.

And here is the paradox of the wind energy industry in 2022: if net zero and other decarbonization targets are to be met, the industry should be on the cusp of a growth phase that would dwarf anything experienced so far.

The question is whether the western manufacturing sector will be in any sort of shape to deliver that growth, or it will endure the fate of the long lost solar industry, a spectre now regularly raised by industry leaders.

Logic dictates that this is the moment to press down hard on the accelerator, designing the technology and building out the capacity required to quadruple installations between now and 2030.

Instead the news is full of stories of lay-offs, factory closures and eye-watering financial losses. And the resources required for the necessary investments are in jeopardy.
Post-covid malaise

The issues are well known. The industry’s relief at surviving Covid relatively unscathed and its optimism about a green recovery are long gone, replaced by a supply chain crisis and a damaging imbalance between supply and demand of projects.

The resulting competition is fierce and not conducive to healthy margins.

And all this at a time when the case for wind is more compelling than it has ever been.