People getting in early at the bottom level have a great chance to move up the ladder as industries expand. They’ll have the experience and connections.

Besides – we just need to build storage, better grid interconnects or smart grid (or a mixture) to allow more renewables on line. RE is already price competitive with New Thermal plants, in short order it will be cheaper than existing Thermal plants. At that point (in about two years for parity, 5 to truly beat it by my guess) we’ll be installing as fast as we can build supporting infrastructure…

This battery technology will actually help FF and nuclear in the short run (very short) as if they can produce at constant load they can run at higher efficiencies and therefore lower their costs. Battery technology will raise off peak prices (by driving up demand) in order to lower peak prices (by driving down costs). This helps everyone in the industry, not just the renewables. Granted, renewables will always be cheaper once they are installed and therefore may lower the overall market price low enough to price them out of the market, but this won’t lower the profitability of thermal plants other than just their overall loss of market share.

Do they have an agreement with a utility to put a lot of their product on line? If so, at what cost?

Humans have foolishly been digging it up and burning it for well over 100 years. And burning it in very large amounts. By doing so we have screwed ourselves.

There are no clean coal power plants which produce no CO2.

And if someone manages to figure out how to build one, the power from it would be too expensive to use.

The problem with burning coal (basically, the fundamental climate change issue) is we are moving that carbon from underground, where it has little or no effect on the climate, into the atmosphere, where it has a greenhouse effect, increasing the amount of solar energy being trapped, leading to increasing global warming.

You think that Australia would be investing in the CSIRO’s UltraBattery invention is a hybrid energy storage device made up of a supercapacitor integrated with a lead–acid battery cell, I don’t bloody under stand it but it’s a bloody good battery for energy storage

But what’s wrong with coal, it is my understanding that coal has formed out of trees? therefore is a clean energy which can be burnt with the addition of clean coal power fired power plants will produce no CO2 emissions within a few years, producing biofuels, as its waste products.

There are a number of large pilot projects on the eastern coast of New South Wales which have already been successful. Federal government gave approval the harvest national parks as clean energy under renewable energy certificate, eucalyptus trees are good source of clean energy which can be burnt replacing coal as a source of energy.

I don’t know that they are really claiming anything past the 10000 cycles, which is a big enough claim.

And even if there were a danger, there aren’t many places that are completely ethically unsound when it comes to burning coal. China is getting a carbon price, India has a coal tax, and Europe and Australia have carbon prices. Given the declining cost of wind, solar, and storage, I can’t think of anywhere in the world where a new coal plant would be a good long term investment even if I could magically know I would never have to pay a carbon price or for its effect on people’s health.

My problem is that I don’t want to squash what could be legitimate people with actual concerns/issues. But it looks to me that we’ve got someone who is just a chain jerker.