Libs making this election a referendum on unions role in community and ALP making it a referendum on Workchoices.

Libs will lose both.

I guess that’s what happens when you think you are born to rule. Even the threat of losing is an affront.

Because the “right wing” press headline a red herring story about 13 ineligible labor candidates , labor bloggers get sucked in to talk or worry about it. Rudd will ignore it and stick to the main game….so should Labor bloggers (ie. ignore it also)

‘Dirty dozen’ smear on ALP candidates
“John Howard was forced to spend most of yesterday insisting he had no plans to take Work Choices further as the Liberal Party tried to smear a dozen Labor candidates by implying their nominations were invalid.”

The most cost effective solar power system currently is the linear fresnel array (google it) and this is what is now being scaled up to hundreds of megawatts in california. the energy storage system is called ‘molten salt storage’ (google is your friend).

The next most interesting solar technology is is called solar thermal updraft, or solar tower for short. This has the advantage of a 100 year plus lifetime. We were going to have a 200MW tower built in australia but the backers pulled out thanks to Howard playing silly buggers with grants.

The other nice thing about solar towers is, they have inherently a huge thermal mass. Can you say baseload? Yes you can.

The one and only solar technology that is home grown and has had minimal government backing is the solar photovoltaic concentrator concept. Now this system does not have inherent energy storage but it can be backed up at modest cost with a large vanadium redox battery. (Again, home grown, but developed overseas thanks to Howard starving funds from universities).

Then there is wind power. The detractors of wind power point to ‘capacity factor’. This is true of one particular site, but statistically and over a large enough area (such as Australia) the capacity factor can exceed 99%. Don’t believe me, go ask the CSIRO.

Then there is geothermal. We have huge resources here in Aus. Some here in the hunter valley. I’m not going into detail here, but the engineering is now very well understood.

Then there is biomass (which we have a lot of and even more potential for). Baseload? Yep sure.

And lets not forget that coal stations aren’t 100% reliable. That’s why we build some redundancy and some gas fired stations into the mix in any case. The same goes for solar/wind/etc + gas backup.

Then consider this. Baseload, the stuff we need even at midnight, is about 20% of our current generation capacity. Even without clever ways to shift useage to other hours of the day, we can quite happily replace every other coal station with solar TODAY, and still have baseload capacity 20 years from now.

So yeah. Sorry. Argument is toast. Solar is todays technology and there is billions being invested in it in the US and Germany. we in australia are missing out. One should pay more attention to what Garett is sayng about opportunity.

-moo-

FORMER Labor number-cruncher Graham Richardson has picked the result of every federal election for the past 30 years - and has picked Kevin Rudd to win on Saturday with a record swing.

And the former ALP senator and factional heavyweight-turned political commentator also predicts Prime Minister John Howard will lose the Sydney north shore seat of Bennelong, which he has held since 1974.

“I think people have just stopped listening to John Howard. He just stayed too long,” Mr Richardson told the Nine Network last night.

“I think it (a Rudd win) is a probability rather than a certainty but it leans more to a certainty, I guess.

“I'd say he's going to win 20 seats, and that's a lot.

“You've got to remember that historically, this means the biggest swing Labor has ever achieved in its history by a long way.

“We need 4.88 per cent to win. I think Rudd will get considerably more than that.

"It's likely to be something like six or seven per cent, and that's extraordinary.”

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22795669-12377,00.html