[url=http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/08/12/zca2020-critique/]Critique of Zero Carbon Australia’s Stationary Energy Plan[/url]
The conclusions state:
•The ZCA2020 Stationary Energy Plan has significantly underestimated the cost and timescale required to implement such a plan.
•Our revised cost estimate is nearly five times higher than the estimate in the Plan: $1709 billion compared to $370 billion. The cost estimates are highly uncertain with a range of $855 billion to $4191 billion for our estimate.
•The wholesale electricity costs would increase nearly 10 times above current costs to $500/MWh not the $120/MWh claimed in the Plan.
•The total electricity demand in 2020 is expected to be 44% higher than proposed: 449 TWh compared to the 325 TWh presented in the Plan.
•The Plan has inadequate reserve capacity margin to ensure network reliability remains at current levels. The total installed capacity needs to be increased by 65% above the proposed capacity in the Plan to 160 GW compared to the 97 GW used in the Plan.
•The Plan’s implementation timeline is unrealistic. We doubt any solar thermal plants of the size and availability proposed in the plan will be on line before 2020. We expect only demonstration plants will be built until there is confidence that they can be economically viable.
•The Plan relies on many unsupported assumptions which we believe are invalid; two of the most important are:
1. A quote in the Executive Summary “The Plan relies only on existing proven commercially available and costed technologies.”
2. Solar thermal power stations with the performance characteristics and availability of baseload power stations exist now or will in the near future.