Xerxes - "We have enough of the black stuff to last 100's...

Xerxes - "We have enough of the black stuff to last 100's years!"
And there is enough gold in the ocean to make golden robes for everyone.

The kickers are the price of extracting the resource (going up) and the benefit relative to alternatives (going down).

Soon the very idea of building huge furnaces to burn rocks to generate power at 40% thermal efficiency delivered will be viewed as intolerable as most people now view unregulated dumping on crude industrial waste into the local creek.

Even at August 2010 installation costs, residential PV is cost equivalent with mains grid retail electricity in WA, NSW and probably Vic and Qld. PV power will get cheaper (modules are already being made for US$0.75/W vs current installed costs in Australia of about $4/W). PV will even make a modest profit with rebates/RECs and FITS if one can front the money to install it.

Retail electricity will go up another 30-50% to around A$0.30/kWhr in the next 2-3 years just to cover replacement of clapped out 40 year old transformers, wires and poles.

Residential PV is currently around A$0.20-.25/kWhr and is going to get cheaper rapidly (squeezing profit margins but not necessarily total profit of CBD, SOO, AIR, AFT, EnergyMatters and everyone else as it does).

Solarfeen can critique my figures but they are all numbers I have seen quoted within the last month in various places.