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Q3: With electricity consumption steadily growing, can renewable energy technology ever catch up? For instance, if we coupled a big solar project to a big hydro project wouldn't we have close to base load power – albeit with a big tide going in and out every day?
Edited from questions submitted by Graham Keith and James Canavan

A: The renewable energy industry can catch up to electricity consumption, and in fact the industry is growing 10 times faster than electricity consumption worldwide. Wind and solar photovoltaics are growing at 30 to 50 per cent each year, whereas energy consumption is growing at just a few per cent each year. Given this growth rate, most of our energy could come from renewable resources by 2040, however that would depend on the current growth rate continuing.

In terms of the second part of the question, there are not enough hydro energy resources in Australia to cover the intermittencies of demand. What you need is a wide variety of technologies to cope with diverse demand in energy consumption. A combination of renewable technologies including solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, even some natural gas off ‘clean coal’, and a wide dispersion of collectors, are needed to cope with peaking demand created when large numbers of people turn things on and off. Shifting demand from night to day, rather than day to night as we do at present would also help.

– Professor Andrew Blakers, Director, Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems, Australian National University

A: As our demand for electricity increases, it makes it more and more difficult to meet that demand with any one option, including renewable energy.

That is why many of the low-carbon strategies that have been developed are two-staged, with the primary focus in the first period on aggressive increases in the efficiency of energy use.

The argument is that this will provide time to further develop renewable energy technologies, lower their costs and develop energy storage capacity that can be used in conjunction with these renewable energy technologies, enabling them to compete with fossil fuel base load generators.

– David Harries, Director, Research Institute for Sustainable Energy

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