Well, the CSIRO has unfortunately ruled itself as incompetent to comment in this area. Add to that statement like “renewables were the lowest-cost of any new-build electricity-generating technology” which is just non-sense. A primary school student wouldn’t make such a silly comment. It’s even worse than comparing apples with oranges. It’s comparing boats with cars in a population spread across islands. Nuclear is being touted as the solution for generating electricity when renewables energy cannot. i.e. no wind or sun. Renewable generation only comes into that argument as a side note because the comparison is actually between storage and nuclear generation.

We already know a significant amount solar power goes to waste and it is still not cost effective to store it. Lets say you have a battery that can store 5kwh and it charges during the day. If the difference in price between your feed in and feed out tariff is say 40c/kWh then during a day you store 5*0.40, which is $2 a day. So the battery saves you $2/day. If the battery costs $5000 then that is 2500 days to break even (6.85 years). Assuming no technology issues requiring services etc. The reality is not everyday will deliver $2 and there will be ongoing costs plus the loss of income on the $5000 dollars you could have invested elsewhere. i.e. let’s say 7.5years. It really needs to be half that to be viable giving the recent history of the reliability of this technology. Do some internet searching.

Anyway, the argument about home batteries is somewhat pointless as the Australian Energy Market Operator does not want it to be part of the solution and everything is setup to keep it this way. Remember the old days of home water tanks being illegal, well this is exactly the same. No industry is going to push a solution which loses them customers so the home battery market, including V2G is being kept, nicely helped by the government, at price point where it is not viable for the majority. It is good business sense and the result of Australia privatising it’s energy infrastructure.

This leads mass scale storage for the solution which is yet to be achieved anywhere in the world, particularly for a country as sparsely populated as Australia, with some intense population regions. Comparing Nuclear against that is like comparing a McLaren to Marty’s DeLorean.

The discussion about blending hydrogen and then converting to fully green hydrogen is still in the DeLorean territory. You need a lot of Hydrogen and the interim blending stages may be more polluting only to find the power plant wont actually be stable at 100% hydrogen.

Finally, everything costs more and is more difficult to do in Australia. So to believe we would be able to roll out something that the rest of the world isn’t, because they know it’s not there yet, over proven technologies the rest of the world is relying on for zero emissions, is just fantasy or dishonesty. Unless of course we’re aiming to have the most expensive, least reliable and highest green house gas polluting energy grid in the western world. (Maybe do some research on how many businesses have gone bust throwing their weight behind some promised technology that is quite there yet.)

If you honestly believe anything coming from the government and their backers (CSIRO et al) then ask yourself why they haven’t put a stop to the current waste of solar generated power across the grid. This is no surprise and the government could easily address by getting home battery costs down to a viable level. This includes catching up to the rest of the world on V2G and has to include installation costs. The answer is it’s not about generation and its’ cost. It’s about who stores it and the private players, supported by our Labor government, want that to remain in the hands of private players. Nuclear would be a step towards public ownership, to important to leave in private hands, and we cannot have that.

I don’t like the idea of nuclear but I also dislike questionable people using cost as an argument against it when they don’t actually have something proven to compare it against. This is about saving the planet and reducing our ability to drive climate change. Why hasn’t the government mandated that every house that can have solar panels should have solar panels and at least a 5kWh battery ? Especially as it is apparently so cheap.

So, briefly, comparing panels, windmills and batteries with continuous generation such as nuclear, is completely ridiculous.