14 DAY TRIAL // Australia is eager to fully embrace clean green solar power and money shouldn't represent a bump in the road, even if this ambitious project requires a lot more than pocket change. In order to exploit the entire potential of renewables, Canberra would have to come up with $100 billion.
This amount is necessary to cover the costs of photovoltaic cells expected to provide enough energy to a significant surface twice as big as Sydney, CleanTechies reports.
This plan would reduce Australia's coal dependency that has become worrying since it currently uses coal to satisfy up to 80% of the overall energy demand. This is the main conclusion of a report issued by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, entitled “Keeping the Home Fires Burning.”
The recent reports reveals that an expected reduction of fossil-fuel burning processes is likely to become noticeable in Australia but not by choice, but as a result of the growing price of these limited resources and their increased scarcity. Moreover, the authors of this study highly doubt the efficiency of renewables, correlated with the current poor green technologies.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like renewable sources of energy will be able to provide adequate substitutes, at least based on current technology. Developing countries are even less likely to be able to adopt alternative energy sources on a large scale,” reveal Andrew Davies and Edward Mortimer, the authors of this report.
Australia is fortunate to have access to one of the most important sources of petroleum in the Timor Sea. Despite this fact, a conflict with Timorese government developed during the last nine years has considerably decreased the potential of this resource.
Even if at this point in time alternative sources of power don't seem trust-worthy and might require decades to improve their current position, they play a significant role in the energy puzzle.
”The requirement (to generate solar power per capita) can also be expressed as 200 square meters of panel per person, or about four times the average amount of roof area per person in Australia today. As a rough estimate, if the cost per panel could be halved (due to economies of scale), the total cost would be around $100 billion” conclude the authors of the report.