This weeks long read: How countries can go fossil fuel free with wind and solar superpowers

[SteamyTea]

How countries can go fossil fuel free with wind and solar superpowers

South Australia is a renewable energy champion and now plans a truly fossil fuel-free grid. How did it make such a remarkable turnaround, and can the rest of the world follow suit?

By Alice Klein

24 October 2023

 

 

 

Clever use of solar and wind energy is providing three quarters of South Australia’s power

Paul Souders/Getty Images

 

A DECADE ago, the main landmark in Port Augusta, a town in South Australia, was a 200-metre-tall chimney puffing fumes from a coal-fired power station. “You could see it from 40-odd kilometres out,” says Gary Rowbottom, who worked at the plant for 17 years.

Today, however, there are no hints of this history. The chimney is gone and the sky is a pristine blue. The chief landmark now is a tall tower topped by a dazzling light, where sunlight reflected from 23,000 mirrors on the ground is focused to power four giant greenhouses in which tomatoes are grown. Next door is the newly built renewable energy park, home to 50 wind turbines and 250,000 solar panels.

Port Augusta is representative of a remarkable shift that has swept South Australia. In 2007, just 1 per cent of the state’s electricity came from solar and wind. Now it is 73 per cent (see below graphic) – the highest proportion of any major grid in the world. On days that are particularly sunny and windy, it powers itself with 100 per cent renewables. That happened on 180 days in 2021 and for a 10-day consecutive stretch in December 2022. The state is now racing to ramp this up to renewable-only power year-round.

Coming from neighbouring New South Wales, where just 31 per cent of electricity is from renewables, I find this clean energy rush highly enviable. It is also highly instructive to the wider world, which needs to rapidly wean itself off fossil fuels to avert a climate disaster. To find out how such progress is possible, I have crossed the border to meet those leading the charge.

 

source: opennem.org.au

South Australia covers almost 1 million square kilometres – more than seven times the area of England – but has a population of just 1.8 million. Almost 90 per cent of the state is desert, so most people live along the wetter, cooler south coast, largely in the capital Adelaide.

The state’s renewable energy push began in 2002, when the South Australian Labor Party was elected to government. Its initial interest in renewables was in fact economic, says Tom Koutsantonis, the state’s current energy minister under its latest Labor government. At the time, South Australia’s electricity was very expensive, partly because its large, spread-out grid is paid for by a relatively small population, and partly because the previous Liberal government had privatised the state’s electricity assets “on terms that wouldn’t benefit consumers”, he says.

Weaning off fossil fuels

The Labor government wanted to “smash up the monopoly” of the newly privatised coal and gas-fired power stations to drive electricity prices down and “the obvious answer was renewables”, Koutsantonis tells me at his office in Adelaide. The government realised the desert could actually be a “massive opportunity” because it provided the vast amounts of space, sun and wind needed for competitive renewable energy generation, he says. In 2002, the government approved the state’s first wind farm on the Fleurieu peninsula. This opened the floodgates to more renewable energy projects, with 24 onshore wind farms and five large-scale solar farms now operating. In 2008, it also began incentivising households to put solar panels on their roofs by offering generous payments to them for any excess solar energy that was fed back into the grid.

“We had this at our house and suddenly I was getting credits on my electricity bill because I was selling more than I was using,” says Jenny Paradiso, a former librarian in Adelaide who co-founded a solar panel installation business called Suntrix in 2009. As word spread, people rushed to get panels and cash in, she says. Now, more than 40 per cent of South Australian homes have them – one of the highest rates of uptake in the world. One afternoon last month, a major new milestone was reached when the state’s entire electricity demand was met by rooftop panels alone.

The drive for solar power

Certainly, as I drive around, the enthusiasm for solar is evident. There are panels carpeting the roofs of homes, shops, pubs and public toilets. I meet Adam Langham, a chemical engineer in the Adelaide suburb of Netley, who has 58 panels on his house and car port. They produce 12 times more power than he, his wife and two children consume. The government discontinued its subsidy in 2011, but smaller payments are still offered by private electricity companies, meaning the family makes more than enough money to pay off the upfront cost of the installation. “I’ve had quite a few friends call me up over the years and say, ‘OK mate, solar panels, what’s the go?’ and I tell them, ‘they’re a no-brainer – go for it’,” says Langham.

Wind energy has also been received more warmly in South Australia than in New South Wales, where a planned wind farm near the town of Berrigan was recently scrapped due to a community backlash. One Berrigan resident told the local newspaper the project would “pose physical and mental health threats to our children”. Here in South Australia, however, there are framed paintings of wind turbines in my motel room in the town of Burra.

 

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What explains this difference in attitude? Fran Baum, a public health social scientist at the University of Adelaide, says one reason may be that South Australia has a long history of being progressive. It was one of the first places in the world to allow women to vote and stand for parliament, for example, and the first Australian state to decriminalise male homosexuality.

 

 

Port Augusta’s coal-fired power station is gone. Today a solar farm dominates the skyline

Gary Rowbottom

 

Wind farm developers are also getting better at working with communities, says Tom Jenkins, who heads the South Australian branch of Neoen, a company that is building the state’s biggest wind farm, Goyder South. For example, it funds community projects near its wind farm sites, including local clubs and sporting teams; encourages its contractors to employ local businesses; and hires First Nations people to supervise construction in case of the discovery of artefacts or remains. For the Goyder South project, the company will also offer annual payments of AUD$1000 to $5000 to every household within 6 kilometres of a wind turbine as a goodwill gesture.

I do, however, meet some people for whom the switch to renewables has been challenging. Rowbottom and around 400 colleagues, for example, lost their jobs in May 2016 when Port Augusta’s coal station, the last one in the state, closed. Few were able to find jobs in the town’s new renewable energy sector, which required fewer staff and different skills. Rowbottom initially had to move to Queensland to work at another coal power plant, but has since found employment back in Port Augusta.

There have been other hurdles to overcome. In September 2016, South Australia suddenly faced its biggest test yet when almost the entire state experienced a blackout that lasted for days in some areas. “It was the first state-wide blackout like that in Australia in about 50-odd years,” says Christiaan Zuur at the Sydney arm of the Clean Energy Council, which represents Australian renewable energy businesses.

 

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The blackout was triggered by a violent storm that knocked over more than 20 electricity pylons and cut three of the four major transmission lines in the state. Coal enthusiasts in the federal government seized on the event to argue that renewables were unreliable. For example, Scott Morrison, Australia’s treasurer at the time, who became its prime minister from 2018 to 2022, accused the South Australian government of “switching off jobs, switching off lights and switching off air conditioners and forcing Australian families to boil in the dark as a result of their Dark Ages policies”.

Koutsantonis believes the state’s supply would have gone down regardless of its energy mix, due to the severe damage to transmission lines. But the mocking that South Australia received made the government there determined to prove the naysayers wrong, he says. “We hated the ridicule we got from the rest of the country.”

“After the blackout, a whole bunch of very positive things were put into place that have led to South Australia now being where it is – a world leader in terms of its renewables uptake,” says Zuur.

In 2017, for example, the state government created a AUD$150 million technology fund to provide grants or loans to businesses that could offer new technologies that would make the grid more resilient.

Backup batteries

One project to get funding was a giant battery – the first of its kind in the world – to provide back-up in the event of major grid disturbances. It was built by Tesla following a famous bet on Twitter between Mike Cannon-Brookes, Australia’s best-known tech billionaire, and Tesla boss Elon Musk. Musk told Cannon-Brookes that Tesla would get the battery installed and working in less than 100 days, otherwise it would be free. Luckily for Tesla, it achieved this in 63 days.

The battery is near Jamestown and looks like hundreds of refrigerators lined up in rows in a field. Each is filled with lithium-ion cells that are all connected to form one big battery with a capacity of 194 megawatt-hours. The facility monitors the frequency of the local electricity grid and if it suddenly rises or falls, the battery rapidly charges or discharges to stabilise the grid.

This has since proved its worth on multiple occasions, including in August 2018, when lightning strikes caused widespread grid problems across the eastern half of Australia. Major blackouts occurred across New South Wales and Victoria, but the lights stayed on in South Australia, as the battery was able to rapidly reverse the sudden drop in grid frequency. Inspired by its effectiveness, Victoria and New South Wales have since built their own big batteries.

 

 

A giant battery provides backup to the grid in South Australia

Bradley Cooper / Alamy Stock Photo

 

The same is true in several US states that are also ramping up their wind and/or solar generation. California, Texas and Florida have recently built or are building big batteries to help maintain the stability of their grids as they change their energy mix.

Another innovative project that emerged after the blackout was a “virtual power plant“, also built by Tesla with some initial government funding. It comprises a network of solar panels and batteries that Tesla installed for free on more than 4000 government-owned social housing properties across South Australia. Tesla uses sophisticated software to coordinate the individual systems so they function like a single power plant. This allows it to trade surplus solar energy stored across the battery network on the electricity market.

This appears to be a win-win for everyone because it makes money for Tesla, reduces electricity costs for the social housing residents and helps to stabilise the grid so that blackouts are less likely for the wider community.

I meet Craig Renton, who lives in a social housing property in the outer Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth. He joined the virtual power plant in August last year and says it is “really good”. “My wife and I are pensioners and it saves us money – about AUD$60 a quarter – which makes a difference,” he says. Renton uses a machine to help him breathe at night and if there was a blackout in the past, “I had to get up to get the generator going, but since we got the battery, now the power comes back on within 5 seconds”, he says.

Equitable access to renewable energy

Renton says there is “no way” he would have been able to afford solar panels or a battery without the scheme. In this way, the virtual power plant is helping to address a key criticism levelled at these technologies, which is that they are typically only accessible to the wealthy. “One of the principles that we have in this energy transition is that we want to make sure we don’t leave anyone behind,” says Scott Oster at the South Australian government’s energy department, who has helped manage the project.

Despite all this progress, however, average electricity prices are still higher in South Australia than in most other parts of the country. This has meant there has been “a bit of fatigue creeping in” among the community, with people questioning the benefits, says Koutsantonis. Electricity prices have remained stubbornly high because South Australia still relies on gas-generated electricity to fill the gaps on days when there isn’t enough sun and wind, and gas has become increasingly expensive in recent years, he says.

 

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As a result, the most pressing matter now is to find ways to store the excess solar and wind energy produced at particular times of day or on certain days, so it can be used when there is a deficit, instead of falling back on gas, he says. One solution may be to use excess solar and wind energy to power electrolysers that split water to make hydrogen. This hydrogen could then be stored and converted back into electricity when needed, either by burning it or feeding it through hydrogen fuel cells.

To test this idea, the state government will commit AUD$600 million to building a hydrogen power plant near the town of Whyalla, which is due for completion in 2025. If it works, the state will be able to meet its target of running solely on renewables by 2030 and will probably have the world’s first large fossil fuel-free grid based on solar and wind energy. “If we can decouple ourselves from coal and gas prices, we decouple ourselves from international price shocks, and then all of a sudden the cost of power is just what it’s costing us to generate it,” says Koutsantonis.

 

 

A massive solar farm powers a tomato farm in South Australia

Gary Rowbottom

 

According to Zuur, there is no reason why other parts of the world couldn’t replicate South Australia’s rapid adoption of renewables. The state has certain advantages, including large amounts of space, sun and wind, but other places can tap into their own advantages, he says. For example, nations with less land, like the UK and Japan, have built wind farms offshore, while Iceland, which gets little sun, uses alternative renewable resources like hydropower and geothermal energy to generate almost 100 per cent of its electricity.

Personally, seeing what South Australia has achieved in a relatively short space of time has filled me with optimism that the world will be able to wean itself off fossil fuels sooner than we think. Although its energy transition hasn’t been perfect, it has shown that the key ingredients for success are strong political leadership, winning community trust, willingness to try new technologies, equitability and, most important, never giving up.

Alice Klein is a New Scientist reporter in Sydney, Australia

[ProDave]

This just highlights how easy it is for countries with low population density, abundant land, and a warm sunny climate to go completely green.

 

Not so easy for the UK with a much higher population density, not so much "spare" land, and a much less sunny climate.  Oh and tight planning regulations.

 

We can see the difference in the UK.  Orkney for instance produces more green energy than it can use.  Easy on a low population windy group of islands.  Even Scotland as a whole with it's low population density, lots of coastline for offshore wind and already a lot of onshore wind should be able to generate it's own green energy.  Not so easy for the SE of England with it's high population density and not much "spare" land.

[Onoff]

@SteamyTea have you an actual link to that article please? 

[SteamyTea]

15 minutes ago, Onoff said:

@SteamyTea have you an actual link to that article please? 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26034621-600-how-countries-can-go-fossil-fuel-free-with-wind-and-solar-superpowers/

[Onoff]

21 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26034621-600-how-countries-can-go-fossil-fuel-free-with-wind-and-solar-superpowers/

 

Thanks, looks like I have to subscribe

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, Onoff said:

, looks like I have to subscribe

There are a lot of if free articles, and you can subscribe to the news letters.

It is a good comic as you get an up to date snapshot of what is going on.

Don't think the online only version is that expensive.

[JohnMo]

3 hours ago, ProDave said:

Not so easy for the UK with a much higher population density, not so much "spare" land, and a much less sunny climate.  Oh and tight planning regulation

Two news items this week on TV, with the people being interviewed in tears, one complaining about a proposed wind farm, calling it a ring of steel and the other a solar farm. And both stating they are all for renewables, but, basically as long as it's somewhere else

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, JohnMo said:

Two news items this week on TV, with the people being interviewed in tears, one complaining about a proposed wind farm, calling it a ring of steel and the other a solar farm. And both stating they are all for renewables, but, basically as long as it's somewhere else

 They should have their supply limited to match the percentage of renewables being generated.

So if we have 70% RE going into the grid, they get 24 [h] * 0.3 = 7.2 hours or limit their supply by a limited amount i.e. 80 [A] * 0.3 = 24 Amps.

[JohnMo]

2 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

 They should have their supply limited to match the percentage of renewables being generated.

So if we have 70% RE going into the grid, they get 24 [h] * 0.3 = 7.2 hours or limit their supply by a limited amount i.e. 80 [A] * 0.3 = 24 Amps.

No we need better laws such as the one in Singapore - 'for the greater good', basically 'shut up, your feelings don't matter, we are doing it'. Because it provides more benefits to people or the environment, than just you.

[SteamyTea]

4 hours ago, ProDave said:

This just highlights how easy it is for countries with low population density, abundant land, and a warm sunny climate to go completely green.

We have plenty of roof tops, many which are suitable.

We also have plenty of daylight, higher temperature and direct sunlight are not needed.  Wind we have an excess of.

It really is just down to planning.

 

What is so ridiculous is that it is going to happen sometime.  I would rather it happened now so I get the benefits, not some future generations of other peoples offspring (who would be benefitted anyway by today's actions).

Edited October 28, 2023 by SteamyTea

[TerryE]

6 hours ago, ProDave said:

This just highlights how easy it is for countries with low population density, abundant land, and a warm sunny climate to go completely green.

 

We've got lots of suitable offshore for large  wind farms, and just think of all of those acres used to grow biofuels (The last published ONC figure was 120,000 hectares in 2020) and could convert this to PV or agroPV (e.g. grazing livestock under the PV cover).  With some battery and extra pumped hydro we could easily get over 80%.

[SteamyTea]

7 minutes ago, TerryE said:

those acres used to grow biofuels (The last published ONC figure was 120,000 hectares

I think you get about a 2 MW_p of solar on a hectare.  But let us say we can only use a quarter of it for PV effectively i.e. large enough grid connections, access, lease conditions etc.

So 0.5 MW_p.

 

120,000 x 0.5 = 60,000 or 60 GW_p which is almost as large as the total capacity of the UKs generation.

Picking Leicester, as it is about halfway up England, and punching in an optimally angled, 1 MW_p installation into PVGIS, it shows a December output of 37 MWh, or about 11 MWh/day.

Multiply that by 6,000 to match the potential resource, that could supply 66 GWh/day.

A quick look at December 2020 Grid Watch demand figures shows a mean power of 33.5 GW.  The peak is 47.3 GW.

I would think, before land rental and connection charges, a PV farm would cost about £500,000/MW_p.  So 60 GW_p would cost £3bn (about a sixth of what has been spent on Hinckley Point so far).

OK, so storage is needed, and a lot of it, as in December all the generation is done in 9 hours, leaving 15 hours of darkness.

Looking at Grid Watch again, the mean darkness demand is 31 GW, with a peak of 42 GW.

So the storage would have to be in the region of 500 GWh.

If a car has 50 kWh of battery storage, a million of them will have 50 GWh.  I think Tesla has already made over 2 million Model 3s, so 1 company has already used, in just one of their model range, 100 GWh of batteries (the Model 3 has a battery between 57.5 and 82 kWh, but you get my point).

So battery manufacture is not really an issue in this one off case, and anyway, it would be installed in phases, so spread over a few years to match the PV installation.

Now I really do not have any idea what that battery storage would cost, but the unit that Tesla fitted in South Australia cost about A$90m for 150 MWh, so a quick convert to English and that is £320,000/MWh.

So 500 GWh would cost around £160bn.  About the same as 8 to 10 new nuclear reactors.

So the total cost, to run the UK purely from PV and storage is less than £200bn (I have added a bit to cover land rental and running costs, though there should be a 'British Management' premium) .  How much as been spent on HS2, £98bn so far?

 

December 2020 electrical usage was 24,888 GWh.  If we divide £200bn by 25,000 GWh, that is £8/kWh.  But that would be putting all the investment onto just 1 month.

A quick look at Grid Watch again and I have calculated that December 2020 used 10% of the annual electrical production (May was the lowest at 6.8%).

So that means we could calculate the electricity price at 80p/kWh, if we put all the costs into 1 year.  Well that would be a bit silly, so if we amortised it at 7.5 years, then the generation, storage, and probably delivery price (as I added a few million on for that), would be 11p/kWh.  About a third of what we currently pay, but that is a wholesale price, so maybe a few changes in the electricity market are needed (not as if we can't do that quickly, we did last year).

 

Back to the land area, I used a quarter of the 120,000 hectares, so 30,000 hectares.

England has a total land area of 130,310 km² or 13,031,000 Ha.  30,000 / 13,031,000 x 100 = 0.23%

I think that is known, in general terms, as (expletive deleted) all.

 

(now I have been mixing kWh, MWh, GWh, km², hectares, pennies, £, £bn etc, so may have made an error, if I have let us find it and put it right so we can use a definitive answer to this question).

 

Oh, and @ProDave, I have used just England land areas, but the electrical demand includes all the colonies you are in.

 

[joe90]

That’s very interesting but what extra demand is going to be made when we all have heat  pumps and EV,s? I have not seen anything about covering that extra demand. I still say insulation of housing stock is a missed opportunity, helps the poor and lowers demand.

[ProDave]

8 minutes ago, joe90 said:

That’s very interesting but what extra demand is going to be made when we all have heat  pumps and EV,s? I have not seen anything about covering that extra demand. I still say insulation of housing stock is a missed opportunity, helps the poor and lowers demand.

the network operators are very aware of that issue.

 

Up here in the sparsely populated windy north, where a lot of new wind power is being built. They are upgrading the grid as fast as they can to carry all this newly generated power down south to where most of it is needed.  But it seems to be a slow process.  There are already pinch points on the grid where it is already at capacity and that is limiting new generation coming on line.  It has been at least 5 years, probably much longer since the plan to build a third HV grid connection from the far north to the Central belt was first proposed.  The section of line that will pass near us is now in the public consultation of it's third proposed route.  It has not even got as far as a formal planning application.

 

To all those "stop oil" protesters, I say it is no good telling the public to stop using oil.  You need to be be lobbying the government so that the necessary upgrades to the grid to enable the full potential of wind power, does not get bogged down in a 10 year planning battle before they can even start the 10 year build program to implement it.

 

The government needs an honest discussion.  Do we carry on as we are, and take a VERY long time to plan anything like this, so we "get it right" or do we adopt what some countries have and "do it regardless" because it is important.  It will be quicker but there will be a lot of people moaning they were not given the chance to object.  You can have it quick, or you can have it right, but not both.

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, joe90 said:

That’s very interesting but what extra demand is going to be made when we all have heat  pumps and EV,s

Well if you take the average household gas usage of 15 MWh and divide it by three, then multiply it by 30 million, you get an extra demand of 150,000 GWh.

If we say that an average car does 12,000 miles a year, and does 3 miles to the kWh, then with around 30 million cars on the road, 120,000 GWh.

So an extra 270,000 GWh a year.

Now the car mileage is probably evenly distributed, so 10,000 GWh/month.  Heating is probably similar to our current electricity demands, so 55% of it spread over 7 months.  So a monthly mean of around 12,000 GWh/month, but varying between 8,000 and 15,000 GWh per month.

So at worse, somewhere around 25,000 GWh extra.

Divide that by the 31 day sin December (probably the worse month on average) then that is 810 GWh/a day.  Daily usage is currently around 804 GWh/day.  So we need to double the land area and the costs.

Still very achievable (if my sums are right).

[joe90]

I did notice when visiting friends just south of Bristol recently new pylons going up across the fields, grid connections I guess. 

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, ProDave said:

To all those "stop oil" protesters, I say it is no good telling the public to stop using oil.

As was established in another thread, they have not been saying that.  They want to stop new licences being granted.  That is something very different.

 

There is 1628.2 kWh of energy in a barrel of oil, todays price is $90 for Brent Crude (what you want for making gasoline).  That is £75.

So 4.6p/kWh before transport, storage and refining (and possibly extraction).

So once in your fuel tank, a similar price to what I calculated for PV/Storage.

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, joe90 said:

I did notice when visiting friends just south of Bristol recently new pylons going up across the fields, grid connections I guess. 

It is to connect up Hinkley Point.  They will probably have to take them down again.

[FuerteStu]

4 hours ago, joe90 said:

That’s very interesting but what extra demand is going to be made when we all have heat  pumps and EV,s? I have not seen anything about covering that extra demand. I still say insulation of housing stock is a missed opportunity, helps the poor and lowers demand.

So maybe the possibility that subsidised heat pumps are only installed in tandem with solar to reduce the impact, and EV charging is a short term issue as far as I see.. Self drive capable cars will take themselves off and charge elsewhere. Returning when needed. 

[Crofter]

4 hours ago, joe90 said:

That’s very interesting but what extra demand is going to be made when we all have heat  pumps and EV,s? I have not seen anything about covering that extra demand. I still say insulation of housing stock is a missed opportunity, helps the poor and lowers demand.

Grid demand peaked in 2002 and has fallen about 15% since then. Mostly because our household appliances have become more efficient- LED lighting is probably the biggest win there.

At the moment, the extra demand from EVs and HPs isn't taking us beyond precious generation capacity, and National Grid seen pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

 

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/electric-vehicles-myths-misconceptions

[TerryE]

@SteamyTea, I like your first-cut analysis.  It tells a tale.  So ~£3Bn for 60 GW_p generation and 500 GWh storage at ~£160Bn.   I note that current LFP pack prices are around £100 / kWh at scale, or £100M / GWh, or £50bn for 0.5 TWh.  Though at those sorts of volumes we'd probably be looking at Na based chemistries which are projecting to be nearer £50 / kWh, so maybe nearer £50Bn.  There are also going to be other Engineering curve economies of scale at those sorts of volumes.

 

We also need to factor in other storage technologies such as pumped hydro, ultra high temp heat batteries; and the flexibility of other non-combustion generation options: windfarm scaling, etc. and geographic spread using interconnectors.  There are also games that you can play with overabundance (e.g. go for 3× or 180 GW_p generation at an extra £6Bn which will create all sorts of business options for what you can do with the excess (e.g. green hydrogen 🤢).

 

 

So yes, there are lots of cheaper options that we could develop with the international political will; ones that would make society better for our old age and our children's.  The challenge is that we've got a lot of old and powerful men whose wealth is tied up in extraction/ mining, refining and burning stuff and who don't mind investing a little of it in lobbying, 'think tanks', etc.

[Crofter]

6 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

If we say that an average car does... 3 miles to the kWh

That's fairly pessimistic.

Looking at the EV Database figures, if you order them by efficiency, you have to scroll through 20 pages until you get cars that are that bad.

 

The Model 3 is listed at over 4.5mi/kWh, with more mundane offerings like the e-Corsa not far behind.

[Crofter]

For all those worrying about how the grid will cope with all those EVs, we're actually using less electricity compared to this time last year:

https://www.energylivenews.com/2023/10/27/uk-electricity-consumption-plummets/

[SteamyTea]

5 hours ago, Crofter said:

That's fairly pessimistic.

It is safer to be pessimistic as if you are over optimistic then you have to invent Hopeium.

5 hours ago, TerryE said:

The challenge is that we've got a lot of old and powerful men whose wealth is tied up in extraction/ mining, refining and burning stuff and who don't mind investing a little of it in lobbying, 'think tanks', etc.

I would have thought that these 'old men' would be the ones to drive the transition.  They have the resources, the experience and they like to make a profit.

I think the real problem is the general public, they just don't believe that renewable energy is cheaper and does not take up all the farm land.

[SteamyTea]

8 hours ago, Crofter said:

LED lighting is probably the biggest win there.

That and TVs.