Greg Boyles Posted September 25, 2011 Posted September 25, 2011 Graham Palmer, industrial engineer from Melbourne Similarly, consider the proposed use of concentrated solar-thermal for electricity - all solar technologies rely on collecting very low density intermittent energy over a very large area - a solar thermal plant requires 15 times the concrete and 70 times the steel as a modern nuclear plant to deliver the equivalent quantity of energy - both materials with a significant environmental footprint - and constructed on massive allotments in remote desert locations far from industrial and demand centres, subject to the vagaries of climate, cloud cover and sand storms. Renewable energy technologies will continue to get more efficient and cheaper. But taking a diffuse, intermittent, energy source and converting it into a reliable power source is not merely a case of stumbling upon a novel solution, or a project to be solved with the modern equivalent of an Apollo space program. These are inherent obstacles that will always remain as characteristic issues regardless of how cheap the basic generation technologies might become. Consider the technical brilliance of the Concorde passenger airliner - to some aviation observers of the early 1970s, it seemed perfectly obvious that the future of commercial aviation would be supersonic, but innovation was still not capable of undoing the physics of supersonic flight - both the supersonic boom and a substantial fuel consumption penalty compared to a Boeing 747 were inherent problems that undermined the Concorde's business case for its 27 years of subsidised operation. For those with eyes to see it, there are indeed striking similarities with today's energy debates.
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