This is a one sided way of putting it. The people who build coal plants in Australia say that they've stopped doing it because of climate change. The plants need to run for decades to pay off the cost of construction. The business people expect that, whoever is in charge of Australia, power plants will have to stop burning coal before then.

The people who build nuclear plants say that there aren't enough Australians to buy their electricity, so anyone who tried to sell nuclear power in Australia would lose money. Again, regardless of the politics.

But since build those monsters is such a long process and the approval alone is so difficult already. If you want to develop something new, you can add a couple years to the project.

The hope is China, they are selling mid-sized pebble generators and they should start producing them pretty soon for delivery in a couple of years.

The high electricity prices are partially due to gold-plating the poles and wires due to very odd 'oversight' agreements in which any investment in poles and wires infrastructure had a guaranteed return on investment - it allowed the infrastructure owners to increase their charges to cover the poles and wires investment, almost no matter how much they invested, so they went LARGE.

High power prices are also partially due to the generators gaming the market in times of high power usage and low wind / solar generation. Making use of loopholes in the 20-year old rules. Loopholes that didn't exist when everything was coal, but caused by the fact that the rules haven't been updated to reflect the inclusion of wind and solar into the generation mix. The "Market Operator" had been asleep at the wheel for years.

Politics is getting in the way of building Wind and Solar , not the other way round.

"Since 2009, the electricity networks that own and manage our “poles and wires” have quietly spent $45 billion on the most expensive project this country has ever seen. Allowed to run virtually unchecked, they’ve spent vast sums on infrastructure we don’t need, and have charged it all to us, with an additional fee attached. The spending was approved by a federal regulator, and yet the federal government didn’t even note it until it was well underway." [1]

> As far as I've been able to tell, we aren't building coal or nuclear because there are outrageous political risks ...

That adjective 'political' is not needed there, and serves to distract from the bigger, actual risks attached to those obsolete technologies. (With my usual caveat that I'm assuming people using the word nuclear mean only fission.)

> .. we aren't building anything else because because the economic option is coal.

Is it technically still an 'option' if you think there's only one?

Anyway, we (Australia(ns)) are not special.

Coal is not a sensible choice -- economic or otherwise -- anywhere on the planet.

Unfortunately many places, including here, haven't comprehended that yet. Or rather, the people that run the country -- both within and outside of the government -- prefer the extant power generation and delivery infrastructure for a variety of fairly obvious reasons.

[1] https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jes...

What else can take the role of supplying the bulk of electricity to grids that doesn't also have it's own environmental concerns?

Gas fire plants

Hydro

Pump Solar

Liquid salt storage

Geothermal

Wind + Large Scale Solar + Storage

Tidal

Decentralized PV solar plus decentralized storage.

There are enormous numbers of combinations of solutions which don't involve coal or nuclear. Both coal and nuclear power are slow to respond to changes in demand (or supply problems), and both are very expensive centralized solutions.

Much more efficient solutions can be built using smaller numbers of smaller, faster, cheaper power stations (ie, gas fired) plus a diverse combination of other sources.

Hydro: Used in the UK to provide peak backup (however thats pumped storage not generation. given the droughts and irrigation usage in aus, not the best idea) requires time to warm up. Has large environmental impact unless using a natural dam (~60 seconds to respond)

pump solar: I'm assuming you mean CSP (https://www.sulzer.com/en/applications/power-generation/rene...) for the sunny parts of Aus, possibly a good choice. Not cheap though (No response time, cannot operate as a base load)

Liquid salt storage: See above, less efficient, slow response time (unknown response time. Suspect in the order of tens of minutes, as heat has to be transfered into water for steam, better as base load)

Geothermal: needs the correct rock formation (again, unknown response time, better as base load)

Large scale solar + wind: Storage is the problem. The amount of lithium required to proper storage is utterly vast. (depends very much on the storage medium and controller, also the amount of wind solar in the preceding days)

Tidal: requires the right geology, can have massive environmental impact, power comes when it wants, but is predictable.(Has some ability to provide backup outside of high/low tide. )

Decentralised x: horrifically expensive, however the cost can be passed directly to consumers. Keeping it all in sync requires decent infrastructure. (without a new and secure mechanism unlikely to provide grid backup, but could be used to dynamically cut load. )

In conclusion nuclear provide a brilliant base load, which can be used for things like charging the various storage devices, or allowing for solar to not work at night. Its relatively cheap across an entire life cycle, and surprisingly dependable. In terms of environmental impact, significantly less that the constant low-level pollutants that are emmited by coal & gas, and the environmental changes caused by hydro. Also Lithium mining has a large environmental impact too, as does PV production.

No, this:

http://www.genexpower.com.au/the-kidston-pumped-storage-hydr...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-21/pumped-hydro-renewable...

base load

Oh, the old baseload argument. I haven't heard that one for a couple of years now.

https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/12/02/3081889.ht...

https://theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-in...

nuclear... relatively cheap across an entire life cycle

> Between 2002 and 2008, for example, cost estimates for new nuclear plant construction rose from between $2 billion and $4 billion per unit to $9 billion per unit, according to a 2009 UCS report, while experience with new construction in Europe has seen costs continue to soar.

https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power

Plenty of other studies showing similar.

"The real challenge is to supply peaks in demand on calm winter evenings following overcast days. That’s when the peak-load power stations, that is, hydro and gas turbines, make vital contributions by filling gaps in wind and solar generation."

In the UK that translates to gas/diesel standbys which in the case of the latter is horrendously polluting

Now, if you look at all of those studies, they make the assumption that there there is gas/hydro to act as backup. that is a base load.

The NRDC link ~25-50% of the power comes from Gas, which puts out CO2. Then there is biomass, which is also environmentally problematic in its current form. (https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_content...) Granted that does not take into account grid scale efficient storage.

But there is a base load, you can see it in the graphs. They almost exclusively use gas to plug that gap. If you want to reduce carbon output, that has to go.

Now, if I was to be in charge of a country, my route to energy security with minimal environmental impact would be thus:

1) insulation at a massive discount/loan.

2) diverse renewables, but not at any cost, and not on farm land. (UK based, so tidal, solar, wind)

3) small scale nuclear. Molten salt or similar with a negative feedback loop

4) Domestic & industrial power storage/generation incentives. If you can adjust the demands at source it greatly reduces the highs and lows.

Why in the UK is something like nuclear needed? Because if we are to reduce carbon output, we need to heat our homes with electricity instead of gas, that triples the power demand at a stroke. insulation standards of 0.6U or less would reduce this significantly. However its still more power than can be feasibly harvested with rooftop solar/wind/tidal alone.

Almost all power companies are already doing combinations of these, while shutting down coal-fired stations - they just aren't economical to run: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-06/electricity-markets-st...

They are all have large renewable generation. See here for the mix: https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Mar...

Fossil fuel subsidies in 2015 were 6.5% of global GDP. That's quite a lot of money. Coal subsidies were about half of that.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X16...

Pump Hydro in disused mine: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/pumped-hydro-in-queensland-ready... (more details: http://www.genexpower.com.au/the-kidston-pumped-storage-hydr...)

Solar Thermal Generation: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-14/solar-thermal-power-pl...

Solar/battery combination: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-31/sanjeev-gupta-joins-sa...

Solar/Wind combination: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-03/yorke-peninsula-batter...

Renewables work, have very modest maintenance requirements, and the intermittency can be managed. It's ridiculous that Australia isn't getting at least 30% of its energy from solar.

I'm just practical about what theatre I endorse, and what I skip.

The article pretty clearly demonstrates that grid-scale battery storage systems are able to provide very fast reaction times.

More battery storage systems, along with other forms of energy storage such as Solar-Thermal and pumped-hydro can take daytime generation and make it usable at night. They're proven workable grid-scale technologies.

Large widely distributed deployments of Wind generation can also provide a lot of capacity. For those who claim wind doesn't always blow - well, it's always blowing somewhere.

Having a lot more individually smaller generators plus energy storage will inherently permit a more stable grid - one smaller generator tripping offline doesn't cause a massive issue.

And a fracking ban didn't cause the gas shortage (whoever told you that has a pretty serious agenda!). Australian gas reserves are the second biggest in the world and relatively easy to access. The "problem" is/was that they are tied up in long term export agreements.

This is a huge problem because gas is required for a lot of our industry, but also because of where it sits in the energy pricing mix, the gas price almost entirely determines the price of electricity - https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/07/truth-behind-electr...

The economists at MacroBusiness (I linked an article from their site above) believe a gas reservation policy (requiring the producers to sell a larger portion of their supply on the domestic market) could fix a lot of this.

What's sillier is that apparently we wouldn't actually import the gas. I've spoken to people associated with the gas industry who have told me that we would actually buy a future allotment of gas from Japan, which would be pretty much directly supplied from Australian providers. In this case the Japanese companies basically become re-sellers who can undercut the local cost of buying the same gas, without that gas ever actually leaving the country.

If this is true, it doesn't surprise me. Australia has a terrible track record for taking advantage of primary resources. We've done similar things with iron ore, oil, gold, diamonds, coal and uranium (and probably pretty much everything else we dig out of the ground).

That's not true. They signed long term supply contracts with a price that was profitable.

at this point we could import the surplus back from Japan (that we sold them originally) for less than what we pay on the domestic market!

This is true. That's the problem with long term contracts! But on the other hand they did guarantee the revenue needed to develop the gas fields.

What's new is the liquefaction LNG export terminals.

From what I understand one of the major problems Australia is the sheer distance the electricity has to travel and the infrastructure required for such a small population.

Solar power seems such an obvious choice, yet many Australians seem to be against it.

Interestingly, because of the combination of great solar conditions and long distances, if you want to build a house in the middle of nowhere, it's cheaper to buy solar and a battery than hook into the grid.

I think many Australians would appreciate that we are in a good position to exploit solar potential, but pitched as part of the green/renewable solution, it's quickly tied into tribal politics and people get a bit silly.

It does have a problem that we do have nights here in Australia, and it is only recently that batteries have got close to the break-even point in terms of cost.

We also have large amounts of wind power, but again it comes at the cost of not being on 100% of the time. Again, storage can solve that as it continues to drop in price.