The options don’t look that promising do they. Carbon emissions and notional budgets mean diddly squat when it comes to the really serious business of making money despite the fact that the planet clearly headed for disaster. The first order of business (sorry bad pun) is what replaces the 40 or so GW’s of coal fired electricity generators because that’s really the showstopper right there. Electricity might notionally only add a few percent to our so-called GDP but can anyone seriously imagine what life would be like without reliable electricity?
Just to put this in some perspective, the failed Solar Power plant at Mildura which was going to showcase solar power to the world was expected to produce 154 MW of electricity for a startup cost of some $420 Million.
But, if we assume that the solar model could scale presumably it would have to do so on a distributed basis which would mean we would have to build about 266 Mildura style solar plants to replace the coal power stations we currently have which at $420 million each would be around $111 Billion which isn’t really that scary when you consider our GDP for 2008 was almost ten times that.
That’s do-able! I mean if you take the problem of carbon pollution seriously and the attendant risks of catastrophic climate change then what’s the problem? So ten percent of all our economic activity (ie money based transactions) gets diverted into developing a sustainable carbon friendly nuclear free power source. It’s not even as though we would have to pay for it all in one year and then there are bound to be smart grid savings and economies of scale that come into the equation. Really it doesn’t seem that hard.
Maybe I should send Kev a little note…dear Kev, get off your phat white arse and actually do something. Here’s an idea….
