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The UIC says Australia's peak electrical demand is around 50 GW, that's before transport electrification. On a continuous average basis the Rudd target of 20% of that is 10 GW so we could do with lot more renewable plant with overbuild and/or storage mechanisms. The 40% criterion suggest we will need 20 GW of low carbon baseload.
Here's one idea. I believe wind power could be used to pump water though an adjoining hydro scheme in western Tasmania to create a 200 MW near-baseload system. The mothballed Heemskirk Windfarm is right at the foot of the Pieman series of dams rising to 230 metres elevation about 50km from the coast. The wind farm was proposed for a spot near the river mouth and had planned to use the same transmission lines as the hydro.
The windfarm electrical output could be dedicated to daily pumping many megalitres of water (fresh or brackish) in a loop. The dam valves should be able to regulate the hydro downhill flow despite uneven flow of water back uphill. I know a litre of water raised one metre has a potential energy of nearly 10 joules but I don't know how much to allow for pumping losses, wind variability or associated river flows.
Only 100 such projects could create the holy grail of renewable baseload.
Thats one way of getting renewable baseload (I won't start on all the other forms of storage).
Pumped hydro is about 75% efficient apparently (according to wikipedia anyway - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage) so its isn't ideal but is very useful in some circumstances.
I prefer diverse (both by type and by geography) renewables to overcome the "baseload" issue (preferably coupled with smart grids / demand management), but storage lets you get away with a lot in the case of unforeseen events or poor balancing of generation distribution - so you need some.
Who killed off the windfarm ? I take it the dams already exist, which is 95% of the battle in terms of environmental obstacles.
It would be handy to come up with a list of sites / projects like this to put into a "post oil" plan for the country...
If I recall the Howard guvmint said the kitty was empty and there'd be no more wind subsidies. I think they said they were at 2% which is a lot less than the green power figures cited in the article. At that point the local Vestas factory closed (it now makes mining machinery) and Tas Hydro sold 50% of the wind farm subsidiary to China Power and Light who are going strong in that country. So the dams are there but the adjoining wind farm is only on the drawing board.
That area is going through a mining revival for nickel, zinc, copper, tin and magnetite. A 100 unit motel style dormitory is being built for workers. I'd guess the extra electrical needs will come via Basslink and Victorian brown coal as well as shiploads of imported diesel.
In other words we continue to grow the carbon dependent economy and sell out renewables. All with the blessing of 'I'll do something about climate change' Rudd.
Yes, it's as I said: we have to distinguish between how much renewable energy is produced and how much GreenPower is paid for. The supply of renewable energy far exceeds the demand in the current Australian market, 700,000 GreenPower households are subsidising 7 million others.