The Clean Energy Future Is Here, Now, and It's Renewable

In California's Mojave Desert and Spain's southern Andalucia, groundbreaking projects are rapidly pushing the price down of concentrating solar power.

Solar troughs, solar dishes, solar towers, solar chimneys, linear fresnel reflectors-- a vast new electricity-generaton lexicon is being created. In the early 1990s many people wouldn't have recognized names like Apple, Yahoo and Netscape. They do now. Similarly, in 10 years' time, corporate names like Ausra, Brightsource Energy, Solel, Sterling Energy and Solar Systems may well become household words.

That's because these companies are involved in concentrating solar power, a technology that is potentially infinite. They are also available now -- not in in 2015 like 'clean coal,' or 2020 like 'next-generation' nuclear. By 2015-2020, concentrating solar power plants will have been operating commercially for nearly three decades, longer than many of Australia's coal-fired power plants. And unlike coal, the cost of concentrating solar power has been falling in price year by year -- and will become cheaper than coal in just a few years' time. No similarly entrenched innovation cycle exists in coal, which has grown fat, lazy and dirty through government protection. Time and technology are now on the side of renewables. Even with huge startup subsidies, carbon capture and storage and next generation nuclear will be ineffcient and potentially-dangerous White Elephants.

In California, Australian corporate exile Ausra is planning a 175 MW concentrating solar power plant in that state's central valley. Headed by long marginalised University of Sydney researcher David Mills, Ausra claims it can deliver power at US10.4c a kilowatt hour (A12c/kwh). It believes it can cut those costs to US7.9c/kwh (A9c/kwh) by 2010. Remember that: 2010.

Were similar plants built in Australia, it would mean that concentrating solar power would be producing electricity for the nation as cheaply as carbon capture and storage a five years earlier than the first carbon capture plant -- which might get up and running by 2015. Similarly, concentrating solar power would be producing clean electricity at competitve prices 10 years before next-generation nuclear is available. A solar farm in Central Australia could provide enough solar energy to power the world. So could a single huge solar farm in America's southwest. So could a single huge solar farm in north Africa. The energy is there. It's like gemstones on a beach.

This is just the potential for solar. There is similarly large global potential for geothermal energy, wind energy, biomass energy, wave energy, tidal energy and countless other forms of clean power we haven't even thought of yet.

Between now and 2030, Australia and the world must make energy generation investments that dwarf anything before because aging and obsolete coal-fired power capacity must be retired at a time when demand is skyrocketing. Given the stakes, isn't it worth getting right?