The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

The spending's not that frightening.

For example, what was last year's federal budget surplus? $17 billion? Well, best figures I can get, taking averages from around the world,

Not perfect, but gives us an "order of magnitude" sort of figure for the costs per delivered watt. Note that I've been pessimistic; load factors decline once there's a lot of the stuff built, as the plum spots get taken, the manufacturing and maintenance quality often declines, etc. I've not taken into account economies of scale. It's best to be pessimistic about these things.

In 2005 Australia produced about 240 billion kWh. This is 240x10⁹ x 3.6x10⁶ = 864x10¹⁵J over the year, or effectively 27GW.

For $17 billion we could, ignoring geography and "where to buy from" issues, get ourselves,

8.5GW_del geothermal, or
3.8GW_del hydroelectric
0.9GW_del solar PV
2.1GW_del solar thermal
1.9GW_del tidal
2.3GW_del wind turbines

We may not have 8.5GW geothermal capacity, I don't know. They reckon there's only 100GW unused capacity in the world (that's for power generation - for water heating and the like there's oodles). We're too dry and flat for that much hydroelectric. But it's reasonable to suppose that between all the rest, for an amount equal to our federal budget surplus we could add a couple of gigawatts a year. This is 2/27 = 7.4% of present delivered power. Well, probably we need to factor in increased population, and turning off some of the old fossil fuel generation.

So we might get 2-5% - call it 3% - conversion to renewable annually. That'd be 100% renewable by 2040. Emissions due to electricity generation would be about a quarter to a third what they are today, assuming no positive feedback; for example now a lot of the emissions associated with building renewables come about because they're built using fossil fuel driven vehicles, and in factories with electricity from fossil fuels. As the economy became increasingly renewable-dependent, we could expect that to decline, so that the emissions due to electricity would be lower than that 1/4-1/3. They'd never decline to zero, though, if only because of all the concrete they use...

Of course we're unlikely to spend the whole federal surplus on any one thing, but there are state surpluses, too, and possibilities of a carbon tax to raise funds, as noted in this article.

In an Australia where we're happy to spend a billion bucks each for submarines that don't work, to hand $300 million in bribes over to Saddam Hussein, to spend $500 million on locking up a few reffos, $250 million each for some fighter jets, a cool $1 billion for a "smartcard" ticketing system for the trains - I really don't find this sort of infrastucture spending frightening at all. It's bloody expensive, but at least we'd see a result.