Siso

You don't get a bill every 3 months for your car. Once you have a car you don't need to worry about it again until you buy another car. Nothing like buying a car really! I have better things to do then look at previous bills as with pretty well everyone else I know.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek regarding the whole economist and a lawyer thing but even what you have gone through should not be necessary. It is a necessity and not all people are that computer illiterate. If I need to look at a page on the internet I start thinking about other stuff. It is a joke! The lesser educated people are the ones that are going to suffer the most. A lot of people aren't home to use there solar if they have it.

It's cheaper remember, about $275 a year.

It would be nice if you didn't need to be a lawyer or economist to get cheap affordable electricity. It is a necessity, not just a nice to have. Not everyone can or wants to decipher data, especially it seems if you are more of a hands-on type person.

Sorry, I thought you said you pay a couple of extra cents. Still kinds of misleads the general public. I had a friend say the Adelaide City Council only uses renewable energy which is not right obviously to some of us but not to the non engineering background people. There is at least 2 gas turbines running continuously in Adelaide directed by AEMO for grid stability so ACC will be getting some of that. ACC purchase some of there energy from a solar farm near Streaky bay on the west coast of the state about 500 km away in a straight line so really they would not be using any of the energy from there. I feel it is misleading and hides how hard the renewable grid is going to be. It also does a dis-service to the rural towns who host these facilities. Does this mean they only use the fossil fueled part of the grid. The ACT do the same thing but are close to the grid stabilising coal plants in NSW. When they say SA got 85% of there power from renewable, I wander if that is minus the stuff the ACT claim from the Hornesdale wind farm or is it double dipped. There is no Wind turbines even visible from Adelaide because it will ruin the view.

Why do you pay extra for green electricity. It is a well publicised fact by our energy minister that wind and solar are the cheapest form of energy.

Indonesia are advancing with some new type nuclear. Hopefully this helps. https://www.petromindo.com/news/article/thorcon-plans-4-gw-of-nuclear-power-by-2035-in-indonesia Thorcon has been working with there government for quite a few years.

Sounds like the renewable policy. No one has done what Australia is attempting with Wind and solar unless the have lots of hydro and accessible geothermal. Looks like a lot of storage in the ISP is behind the meter(electric cars, power walls) Do we really want the public controlling our energy system (towards the end of the video)

Also ban politicians and their staffers from taking jobs with companies that they had contact with during their political careers. Conflict of interests don't seem to matter. Couple in recent times have gone into the gas industry

Love pumped hydro, 80%round trip efficiency, multiple GW size storage and a mature technology.

sorry I'm late on this. Regarding the report the coalition have on NP. It can't be worse than the gen cost report. It sounds like the new one still give NP a 30 year life which is not right. Some plants have been given 20 year extensions on their 40 year lives which will bring them out to 60 years. There is no reason not to expect the new reactors to be capable of 80 years. They also gave wind a 40-50% capacity factor. The farm I worked was in the low 30's and one year I know was under 30%. There hasn't been much private interest in NP in Australia because the easiest way for companies to make money is the status quo. Do we really want private companies running our power. It hasn't really been to successful in the last 30 years. NP can load follow, it just never has had to and hasn't been a top priority. The other thing with private retailers is that the general public should not have to be corparate lawers or economists to get the best deal on electricity. This harms less educated (I'm a fitter and work with my hands. If I start reading documents my mind goes blank after a few minutes unless they are technical) people more. Electricity is not just a nice to have but is a necessity. Nuclear spent fuel problem has been solved with recycling, 300year storage for fission products (approx 10 half lives and then very little radiation left) and burial for the long lived waste. (long lived because it is not very radioactive) The biggest issue with it is the new fuel is so damn cheap it may not be economic. Same story with wind turbine blades. Denmark has been going down the renewable path a long time but they still have a coal fired plant. (see www.electrictymaps.com) Germany's opposition are talking about restarting some nuclear plants that are still in one piece. There is a plan for large virtual battery's using everybody's home battery. Do we want our grid to reply on the home owner. I know people that are getting so little return on the excess they are putting into the grid while the retailer gets a lot more saying the will turn them off. Energy Australia was looking at doing pumped storage in SA near port Augusta using sea water but there was not enough profit in it. They will probably hang off until the government (taxpayers)give more money to make it more profitable. I am not anti renewables (worked on a wind farm for over 10 years) but they are far from the answer by themselves. Finished now.

There are different parts to the spent fuel. The fission products that is the high level waste which needs to be stored for 10 half lives (about 300 years) and it will be back to background, this is the nasty stuff and is really radioactive but decays reasonably quickly. Unused fuel(uranium 235 and one of the isotopes of plutonium 239?) which can be reused in the reactor. Light water reactors only use about 3 % of this so it can be recycled and the long lived waste which is not very radioactive and can be stored safely underground. You would need to eat this for the radioactivity to hurt you- Alpha radiation. I wouldn't because it is still a heavy metal. This needs spent fuel reprocessing to separate these parts. France currently does this.

The bad spent fuel is only bad for a small number of years. After 300 it is only as radioactive as normal. It gets less radioactive everyday. The long lived spent fuel is only long lived because it is not very radioactive. There is still a lot of potential energy left in the spent fuel that can/should be recycled. Hopefully new reactors will be built with decommissioning in mind. Yes I would quite have a Nuclear spent fuel facility next to me. Not saying we should use NPPs, but it should seriously looked at.

Storing h2 for export is not easy. High pressures and low temps are needed, losses in efficiency. I think Fortescue have given up in NW WA

The salt has a higher boiling point(>1000degrees) then water meaning that the reactor part of the cycle can be kept at or close to atmospheric pressure instead of high pressure to keep the water liquid around the core. (70 bar in a BWR) The salt is then passed through a heat exchanger to turn water to steam for the turbines. Also in the very unlikely event that the reactor leaks it falls on the floor, cools and solidifies instead of flashing to steam.

Just a update on the cost of a wind turbine I got a quote for a new 3.5MW turbine for an insurance company about 4 years ago. The price was 6,000,000 installed. This doesn't include the price of the civil work, switch yard and the KM's of underground cabling needed for the whole farm. A major hurdle in keeping up with the installation of turbine is the supply chain for new turbines.

We need to remember that putting 30% renewables is reasonably easy. As the penetration get more we need to start adding storage and it gets harder as the base load generators start falling off because it is not profitable. Ireland has some pumped hydro that is filled every night and handles the extra demand during the day. Renewable storage that we need has to handle the multiple days of low wind we had NEM wide like we had at the end of May and other times this year. We still don't really know what this is going to cost because it has never been done anywhere in the world at Australia's scale. (large amount of hydro would help but we don't have the resources for this.)

A bit of info how the UAE got over the regulation writing towards the end of the video

I'm hoping it happens. We have been trying for renewables for the last 10-15 years and we are still nowhere near successful. Can see a bit on the availability and generation of wind recently at this link. https://www.joannenova.com.au/2024/06/despite-spending-1-8-trillion-on-clean-energy-last-year-the-world-is-still-81-fossil-fueled-burning-more-than-ever/ Also some interesting info at Watt clarity website particularly about the amount of wind at the end of last month. https://wattclarity.com.au/ Also see https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time for a real time energy use across the NEM. You can see how far we still need to go with renewables and storage. Every GWh of pumped hydro requires 1 GL (1 billion litres) to be pumped to a height of 400m. 1GL is 1km x 1km x1m dam. Roughly 80% round trip efficiency. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map is also an interesting site. Good to keep an eye on France smashing GWs of energy into their neibours most of the time These websites aren't run by the ABC or Murdoch press. I also worked on a windfarm for over 10 years and we quite often constrained or stopped because of excess generation. The synchronous condensers helped this when they came on line. Renewable generation also gets a large scale renewable energy credits for every MW. This is worth about $40/MWh at the moment which means they can generate down to - $40 dollars before they are switched off. (subsidy?)The large scale gas and coal are paying money for each GWh they generate at these times. You can imagine what they charge when the sun goes down to make up for this. I think we will still be seeing energy prices rise for a long time before they fall.