We have vast stores of brown coal especially in Victoria and huge power stations fed by that, but nothing planned to modernise or renew those stations and other big ones have been closed without replacement pushing up power prices.
The South Australians literally blew up their last perfectly good brown coal station and closed the mine that fed it. They blacked out the whole state.
There’s no export for brown coal, so we’ve got a couple of centuries of fuel and nobody that’s sensible enough to burn it.
Brown coal, that is not even what real coal men call coal. It is one step above peat moss. Back before global warming was even a term I worked in a coal power plant and in a pinch we would burn some of that nasty crap. Got to be dried really well before you can burn, low BTU content and maintenance was a nightmare. That stuff needs to age a few ten thousand years to be useful. Burning wood makes more sense than that god awful crap. Yes…I had bad experiences with brown coal. I am prejudiced.
We had to learn from the Germans just after WWI. Our Aussie General Monash (with German-Polish heritage) was a civil engineer as a civvy so he took the opportunity to visit their plants when he was still getting his corps of five divisions back home. He got all the techniques for drying it and for making briquettes which were used for home heating then came home and convinced the government to build a power station. Not a bad chap … for a German Jew.
It still supplies very cheap power (and who really cares about engineers - real or just ordinary - anyway getting dirty and fixing stuff - unseen!) but the power companies have to buy unreliable renewables to a certain percentage which skyrockets their price.
The warmists are still flat out trying to photograph the smoke stacks belching smoke, but they can’t seem to get that shot for the last several decades.
Nobody lives there and I really mean nobody. There are no roads so you’d have to build access. There are no power grids, so you’d have to build that (or encourage a city or two to move to that supposed paradise). There’s no water, unless you bring it. In short we could put lotsa stuff out there perhaps even a new port. It’s 49 feet below sea level at Lake Eyre. Just dig a channel and let the sea in.
At the end of the day if you do the sums it costs way more to get an end result of an indeterminate quantity of daytime power than plonking a power station on a mountain of coal near a big city with existing grid and human infrastructure that can churn out all the power we need every day for half a century then build another and another because there’s coal for centuries just sitting there a few feet down.
And you can’t run a grid on unreliable renewable power alone because it can’t be synchronised to the cycles of the grid that delivers to customers. You need to have a massive rotating mass somewhere keeping the AC doing its AC thingy.
So nice thought and all that, but no.
Seamen tend to common sense because seamanship is mostly common sense (relearned constantly). Shall we just use that?
I think we may have it . A long skinny country that lies across the roaring 40’s and the frantic 50’s wind generated power is a starter. Solar power is ideal for schools that are using power during the day only and we have geothermal power as well which is only just being used widely. One 7th of all the power generated in New Zealand is used by an aluminium smelter and it supplied by the Manapouri hydro dam.
Most of our power is hydroelectric and if we add wind and solar we keep the water in the lake which makes for a pretty efficient battery.
) but the power companies have to buy unreliable renewables to a certain percentage which skyrockets their price.