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Here in Australia we are still planning to build large coal mines to fuel the furnaces in India and China and for our own power plants. Solar and wind are hippie conspiracies to make us all unemployed and gay, so our politicians keep telling us. You poor fools are doomed!

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dilemma

stable western country with huge amounts of empty land and too much sun makes it fantastic for solar.

but

an entire economy built on mines and the chinese have reduced their buying of iron so coal it is. and those mines have a lot of voting power.

and little water

I'd guess that the amount of energy harvestable in the form of sunlight from otherwise unused land far exceeds the amount of energy in the form of coal resources in Australia.

But how to ship it to China and India? Set up some high voltage lines? Convert the locally generated electricity to some form of transportable, easily re-convertible embodied energy?

Hydrogen or other synthesized gas is an option, but the transfer losses are pretty brutal (and there aren't massive-scale deployments yet, so unexplored terrain as well)

Ship Tessa PowerWalls of course. ;) Hmmmm... actually could be an interesting future business model.

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