ausra

10th October 2009
Sydney Morning Herald
The future belongs to sun and wind

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

[Ausra's Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. David] Mills is participating in a US study that calculated whether [America's 2006 energy] demand could have been met using wind and solar energy.

"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 scale econogy," he said in Melbourne on Tuesday night, as part of the Deakin Lectures.

It is exciting, and Mills has no doubt that wind and solar power can power Australia as well, even though we have a smaller population (concentrated on the coast, where cloud increases), have fewer generators, and wind speeds are lower than in the US. "I believe this will bias Australia towards a larger fraction of storage solar and a smaller fraction of uncontrollable wind. It is becoming clear that [concentrating solar thermal] with storage is the logical future of electrical generation for Australia."