General Discussions

[LP]

That said, WA probably has greater scope for renewable power than most places, particularly if tidal power generation is utilised.

If they go down that track you want to vote them out immediately.

Progress on those tidal and wave technologies has slowed greatly, there seem to be significant issues around reliability and the ongoing costs. The problem is stuff grows on surfaces left in the sea, algae, barnacles, seas grass, life....................... There are some technologies being developed by CSIRO to assist with those issues, but they haven't been trialled yet, a lot is left up to foreign adopters of the technology. Another case of evented here, sold over there, then purchased back for our use off foreign owners!

On the surface it looks to me like the feasibility of some of the projects had been greatly exaggerated, especially in WA where there has been a huge historical investment, which is understandable given the geography. I think the problem is when they do the sums the energy available to harvest is huge, effectively governed by the gravity from the combined mass of the Earth, Sun and Moon, but the practical methods to harvest it just do not exist. A 20m x 20m x 10m pontoon held submerged in sea water present 4000m² of collecting surface, to which about 4 tonnes of life growth each and every month, which sounds a lot but it's just 1kg/m²/mnth of living matter. The added weight destroys the efficiency of the system, so you have to continually clean everything.

Of the renewables solar is far and away the most feasible, but it is not as clean or low cost as people expect and base load remains an issue but solar thermal could be the cure for that problem but it also has issues. I wouldn't want to live next to one of the bigger solar plants, it must be like living next door to an asphalt carpark that's 2km wide, imagine the hot breeze!

But we should leave this debate to energy thread.