Despite Australia’s enormous potential for renewable energy (see "100% Renewable Energy by 2020"), six months after Australia’s introduction of  legislation supposed to encourage the development of renewable energy, not a single major wind or solar project has commenced.

The failure of the scheme has been blamed on poor design of the legislation which promotes domestic solar hot water systems and rooftop solar panels at the expense of large projects.

Clean Energy Council chief executive Matthew Warren said ”What we have is the retail market stymieing the commercial market. It needs to be addressed quickly or we have no large-scale clean generation capacity in three years.”

Projects that have stalled since the scheme was passed include AGL Energy’s 174-turbine wind farm planned for Macarthur in western Victoria

Wind turbine maker Keppel Prince Engineering said it had to decide this week whether to sack up to 150 workers at its plant at Portland in Victoria’s south-west. Managing Director, Steve Garner, said that "We’re finishing off our last project and we don’t have another wind farm to continue on with.”

Beyond Zero Emissions has issued a summary of a report which shows how Australia could use solar and wind power technologies, which are available now, to produce 100 percent of its electricity within 10 years. The full report will be released in coming months.

Australia now gets nearly 80 percent of its electricity from coal with only 1 percent coming from wind power and less than half of 1 percent from solar energy.

The report says that 40 percent of Australia’s electricity could come from wind turbines. Concentrating solar power plants, with molten salt energy storage, could provide 60 percent of total electricity.

Worldwide, some thirty utility-scale concentrating solar power plants are under construction. None of the concentrating solar power plants are in Australia, although Australia has some of the world’s best potential sites. Solar researchers from Melbourne University and Australian National University have already identified 12 sites with a capacity of 3,500 megawatts each.

The report claims that suffiecient concentrating solar power plants could be installed in just four years, from 2011 to 2015, to provide 20 percent of the Australia’s electricity.

The report says that biomass co-firing would be needed to back up solar plants in winter and that new transmission lines between the solar- and wind-intensive areas and population centres would be needed. However, all coal and gas fired power plants could be eliminated and nuclear power would no be needed.

The cost of quitting carbon entirely is estimated at around $36 billion per year – about 3.5 percent of Australia’s annual GDP.

Brian Walsh, director of winemaking at Yalumba, has told business leaders in Adelaide that a rise in temperatures could prevent the growth of some cooler grape varieties, such as shiraz and riesling, for which South Australia’s Barossa Valley is famous. ”Basically, the Barossa will disappear,” he said.

A similar observation has been made by viticulturist, Frank van de Loo, at the Mt Majura vineyard near Canberra. 

Mr van de Loo has recorded grape harvest days each year. "Over the last 20 vintages, this is our 21st vintage, we’ve been coming in at an average of 2.4 days earlier each year," he says. "Of course the curve bounces around a lot from year to year depending on the individual season, but it has a very clear trend. Before long, we’ll have to quit growing chardonnays."

Mr Walsh pointed out that regions in Italy and France grow wine in hot arid conditions similar to Australia, and peolple there choose wine from a particular region. But Australians choose wine based on the grape varieties, like shiraz, reisling or chardonnay and in the future it may not be possible to grow these varieties in regions like the Barossa.

He said that winemakers need to start looking at varieties for hot, dry climates now and not wait 30 years and say ”I wish I’d done something”.

”It’s a risk strategy and out of some of those times we might just stumble across something which is a fantastic idea we haven’t thought of yet," he said.

The New South Wales Planning Minister, Tony Kelly, has approved a $190 million wind and solar farm near Scone in the Upper Hunter Valley.

The Kyoto Energy Park will include 34 wind turbines, a mini hydro-electric generator using recycled water, up to 100 hectares of solar panels and a visitor education centre. It will provide enough renewable power for more than 47,000 homes and create the equivalent of 15 full-time jobs.

Despite extensive community consultation and Government assessment of the farm’s noise, flora and fauna and visual impact – resulting in its scaling back and the attachment of 67 conditions to its approval, some local residents continue to protest at its construction. Carmel Lymbury says the Mr Kelly has ignored community concerns about its noise and visual impacts and thoroughbred horse breeder, Mike Thew, says that he fears the giant wind turbines will ruin the rural landscape.

The French nuclear power company, Areva, has acquired the concentrating solar-power plant manufacturer, Ausra, for an undisclosed price. Ausra was founded by Australian, David Mills, who developed the technology when he was head of the Solar Energy Group at the University of Sydney. Dr Mills moved to California to secure funding from venture capitalists including Vinod Khosla.

Ausra’s Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector technology captures the sun’s power to produce electricity. Mirrors focus sunlight to heat water in  pipes and the resulting steam drives a turbine to generate electricity.

Because concentrating solar power systems produce steam to make electricity, Areva believes that the technology is more closely aligned with its nuclear engineering business, which also uses steam to generate electricity, than with other solar businesses in which photovoltaic cells convert light to electricity.

Areva believes that the market for engineering services around concentrating solar power will expand rapidly this decade and is forecasting a 20 percent per annum growth rate to an installed capacity of over 20 gigawatts by 2020.

The acquisition means that Ausra’s technology is more likely to be deployed on a large scale because utilities and financiers are typically reluctant to work with technology start-ups.

Fresnel solar concentrators