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So much bollocks. When you use oil to produce electricity you have no more oil to produce electricity. It's not renewable.

Apparently you're not quite up to speed. We can make crude oil, in less than an hour. It's an unlimited resource.

I'm all for safe nuclear. Pebble bed reactors for the win.

But when you say algae biodiesel isn't available today, I think we're discussing two different things. You're saying you can't buy it today, and that's true. I'm saying we have the technology to make it if we wanted, which is also true.

As for startup cost, yeah. That will happen. But remember the first transistor was about the size of a baseball and took Bell Labs years to make. Now look what we can do. It'll be the same with algae if we choose to do it. Read that paper I posted. We already have had trial ponds and the numbers that paper uses come from those trial runs. What I'm saying is that we don't have to wait for some breakthrough like we would need to make hydrogen viable. We have everything we need right now. Land, sun, water, algae, and petrochemical infrastructure. All the pieces are already in place, just waiting for the word "go".

Here, read this. It's exciting! We could be doing this today.

If we wanted home grown diesel/gasoline, we could have it. We could stop pulling oil out of the ground and simply grow what we want. Easily and simply. By all means we should pursue nuclear and wind farms and the rest, but we should be doing this too.

Generally no, the consumer never sees this price. The price-per-MW is going to be for transmission system exchanges ("power highway"), instead of distribution system customers ("local streets"). Odds are that the customers will see their bills go up in a month or two, as the power company exercises clauses in their utility contracts to 'cover their costs'.

In practice, it heavily depends on the customer's billing schedule. Here in Portland, OR, I have a fixed residential rate. Some companies, such as Pacific Gas & Electric (CA), Southern California Edison, and Hawaiian Electric, use (optional?) time-of-use (TOU) pricing, where the residential prices are higher during 'peak hours', when everyone is getting ready for work, or returning home and turning on their televisions. These TOU programs often have "if it didn't save you money, we'll bill you the fixed per-kWh rate" options. Real-time pricing for residential customers has been tested a few times, but hasn't been rolled out, for both technical and programmatic reasons. Check out the Olympic Peninsula GridWise Demonstration and the Pacific Northwest SmartGrid Demonstration from PNNL, starting here: http://bgintegration.pnnl.gov/...

Don't Aussies have a lot of disused mines to pump air into?