Again doomsday talk, Victoria is a good example of a state that could easily follow the UKs lead.
66% of the state uses brown coal, the dirtiest of dirty power production. However it has a huge reserve of natural gas from Bass Strait, so straight away you could build gas fired power that could take over base load, that would reduce CO2 emission from power generation by up to 2/3rds. There is your stop gap, or should have been 20 years ago. Moving on you build solar wind and nuclear for base load, in 20-30 years you have Victoria at 1/10th of its current per capita energy footprint. Cost wise, nothing compared to 7 nuclear submarines.
Why has it not been done? Pretty simple, the gas fields are commercial, the coal fields are dug up by the power stations themselves. No one wants to siphon off the profitable gas supply for general power generation.
For interest sake, there was a trial plant constructed that converted brown coal to gas for burning 'clean', that was constructed back in the 1980s. So gas as a clean energy provider has been a consideration for past governments back when it was the SEC. The privatisation of the power industry culled most of the R&D in the area so it quickly was shut down in the 90s, as was most of the community there.
Last edited by 43Inches; 25th May 2022 at 01:29.