Jaguar I-Pace most compelling EV yet., page-87

Unfortunately the Book of Elon has spoken & he shall strike down with great fury anybody that dare stand in his way. Extract from the book of Elon 14:1

Unfortunately we always look for more inventive ways to boil water to drive turbines to rotate the generators for our electricity despite their ultimate weakness of being very inefficient.

Your just trading one means of driving a turbine with another. You will need multiple of these around the country as weather is very fickle & you can't guarantee power delivery 24/7..then problem is good for one day, but what about the next or the next if you have (believe it or not it does & will rain in sunny Qld one day) . These molten salts need to be 'recharged' on a daily basis if not the turbines stop rotating. Its the best we've got right now for bulk storage of "free" solar.

I recall SA looking at something like that & went searching for the article.

Port Augusta is about to get a $650 million, 150-megawatt solar thermal power plant - with plans to have it up and running by 2020. South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill announced that the plant could lead to lower power prices, as well as supplying all of the power needed for state government projects.

Look at the numbers $650M for a 150 Mw solar thermal. If SA was looking at that to power them through the night then they are still falling a bit shy especially if has been raining for a few days. How long to ramp up, then you are dragging supply from elsewhere, is SA case from the coal field of NSW or QLD to keep the light on.

As a comparison, the little ol Tarong (Yes Coal) is 1400mw , 10 times the size. Is bigger better - well yes & no.

It costs Tarong about 2c a tonne to have coal delivered to the furnaces because of the scale & generally carry enough of a stock pile for a 4 to 6 week period...even if coal production stopped for some reason. ie wash plant break down etc.

Take these old clunkers out of the mix & replace with solar thermal & budget for $6.5B to replace the base load output. You will need a lot of these spread around the country side to reduce the risk & would have to build in a redundancy number so 10 to 20% above what the old clucker produces to guarantee supply as your 'fuel' supply can & will vary.

Re Hydrogen it just another way of storing excess power from adhoc renewable energy delivery from the renewables.

And I thought I was being called the one as narrow minded.

When we solve the storage problem, for power delivery to meet demand in any weather condition 24/7 then we will have a solution. Then just need to bottle it & replicate.

Right now we (mankind) doesn't have that, so we work with what we do have.

Somewhere along the way you have misconstrued me an being anti tech/ solar/ whatever.

I'm only anti it when it costs me money & I'm propping up some cottage industry.

We are being fed rubbish to serve the vested interests & politicians when pandering to other minority is not the best path.

Country policies should be set with much more than an eye on the upcoming election & popularist vote, but that will never be the case & why we will never have nuclear in mix in Australia to meet our Co2 target.