ausra

10th October 2009
The Age
With green power comes great responsibility: it's time politicians listened to scientists on wind and solar power

Climate change is a diabolic problem, but the brightest minds are working fiendishly to find genuine solutions, and they will carry the day.

Once such is David Mills, one of our most successful scientists, formerly from the University of Sydney, who quit Australia a decade ago to launch solar power company Ausra in California. It was one of our best brain-drain moments.

Dr Mills is participating in a US study that will soon put paid to that old chestnut - let's quote Malcolm Turnbull from 2007, but it could have been any mainstream politician today - "you cannot run a modern economy on wind farms and solar panels."

In a project funded by Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, America's energy utilities gave researchers at Stanford University a data dump of all the electricity used acorss the country in 2006 - hour by hour - to get a full picture of the load that year. The scientists then calculated whether that demand could have been met using the available wind and solar energy. Without pre-empting the results, which will be released next month, Dr Mills this week gave a pretty clear indication - yes, it can.

"We are finding that solar and wind are a beautiful match for each other and together can carry almost the entire electrical load of a large economy," he said in a Deakin lecture in Melbourne on Tuesday.

It's exciting, and Dr Mills has no doubt wind and solar can power Australia as well, even though we have a smaller population.

"It is becoming clear that [concentrating solar thermal] with storage is the logical future of electrical generation for Australia."