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That's only a surprise to anyone that hasn't figured out that wind and solar power are just proxies for natural gas.

Not in Germany. Germany really doesn't have massive amounts of natural gas power. Gas is too expensive in Europe to be wasted on generating electricity whenever you want to. Germany only generates something like 13% of its electricity in gas plants. Considering that it generates 2.5 times as much from wind and solar, "proxy" clearly doesn't describe the relationship unless Germans can somehow conjure electricity from nothing.

Given the low capacity factor of wind power it's often been shown that just burning the natural gas in a combined cycle plant will nearly always have a lower CO2 output than if natural gas turbines were combined with wind.

This sentence is absolutely nonsensical. One can't make an inference like that from any level of wind capacity factor. Wind's capacity factor here is about as much a red herring as inferring economic viability of solar panels from quantum efficiency of photovoltaic cells (another popular mistake!). But to follow the viable part of your logic, since Germans generate several times more electricity from wind and solar than from gas, and since carbon intensity of wind generation is so much lower for wind and solar than it is even for CCGT plants, replacing the wind and solar power with stable CCGT-generated power can't possible reduce CO2 intensity even if the existing 13% of gas plants are *not* combined cycle plants already, since if if 13% of the generation goes, say, from 600 grams per kWh to 300 grams per kWh, but another 35% goes from let's say ~50 grams per kWh to the same 300 grams per kWh, clearly that's *not* a net improvement.

Solar output peaks at noon, right when people turn off stuff to break for lunch.

I don't know where you live, but where I live, at noon people generally start going for lunch in staggered groups while other workers keep working. Usually not a lot of stuff gets turned off. At homes, stuff is already turned off of course since people are already at work.

Nuclear power is reliable, low CO2, and cheaper than solar power.

Not anymore. At least in certain regions. Those will increase in size over time, though. Very recently, price even in German auctions was around 4-5 Euro cents per kWh, much less than what is requested by prospective nuclear power operators from states as a guaranteeed feed-in price (in my country neighboring to Germany, a guaranteed price of 10 Euro cents per kWh was requested by the nuclear plant operator as a condition for building two new reactors).

Utility scale solar is already at 6-7 cents per KwH before subsides in the South West USA,

FWIW, in India utility scale solar is at 3.8 cents per kWh (2.44 rupees).

I think you are being too pessimistic, Barbara.

Space industry as of 2015 was $335 billion in economic activity ( see page 7 of http://www.sia.org/wp-content/... ), with about 1400 operational satellites in total. We don't have a way to effectively repair or refuel these satellites. When they stop working, we have to replace them at great expense. Saving money or increasing profits provides plenty of "will and commitment" to build the first generation of space mining and production. This would start with propellants, since just about every satellite uses them, and they are a simple product to make.

> we don't know where (or even if) the needed resources exist in viable quantities or concentrations

On the contrary, nearly all satellites operate on solar energy, so we know that is feasible. The total solar flux passing closer than the Moon is equal to the whole world's fossil fuel reserves *every minute*. That's more energy than we know what to do with, provided we can tap it economically.

Meteorites are pieces of asteroids that hit the Earth and survived re-entry. So we are able to examine those in detail, and then infer the composition of asteroids still in space by comparing spectra. For a handful of asteroids, and the Moon, we have visited by scientific missions, or in person, and gotten more direct information. So, for example, we have detailed geologic maps for the Moon ( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resour... ) and are building up our knowledge of other bodies.

> human colonies are a death sentence to anyone living there permanently

I will set aside the fact that the human condition has a 100% mortality rate so far, and that a minor oops driving to work will kill you on Earth. But I helped design and build the Space Station, and it's been occupied for 15 years now. Think of it as a proof of concept. A space colony in orbit or on the surface can deal with gravity by rotation. On the ground that means a merry-go-round or racetrack setup that people use for as many hours as required to maintain health. Bulk rock is easy for surface locations, and not so hard for orbital ones. Enough thickness will provide good shielding. Most illustrations of space colonies are "artist's concepts" and don't address safety in the way engineers building bridges and skyscrapers have to. A real colony would have multiple layers of pressure shell, compartmentalization, emergency shelters, and other safety provisions. Yes, accidents and failures will happen, but we live with fires and natural disasters on Earth. The question is can you bring the risks down to a comparable level as on Earth. I think the answer is yes.

> at the rate we're avoiding meeting even our moderate climate change goals, we'll have a massive depopulation or extinction event long before that.

We are installing over a hundred billion watts of solar and wind capacity worldwide this year. Coal use has dropped by a third in the US in the last 10 years. Things could move faster, but when oil states like Saudi Arabia and Dubai are installing renewables, it should be obvious change is happening ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/sa... )

> The problem today is that solar costs three times what it needs to cost to be competitive.

Read this article and say that solar is still 3x competitive range:

http://www.pv-tech.org/news/buffett_projects_record_low_cost_is_part_of_pricing_trend_says_first_solar

Same company as the original story, by the way, NV Energy.

There are multiple 50+GW battery installations in Japan,

50+ what? GW is a unit of power, not energy. How much energy do these magic batteries store?

A quick web search shows that in 2014 a 400MWhr system was described as "the biggest in the world".

Also, in 2013 METI were boasting about: "World’s largest battery storage system to be installed in Japan" for a 60MWhr system coming online in March 2015.

So your "50+GW" rubbish is not only meaningless, it's a flat out lie,

> Now they're just waiting for the products to arrive en masse.

For the Phillippines, that was 2014. They went from 3 MW installed in 2013 to 117 MW in 2014 ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/ih... ).

Worldwide, installations are expected to increase from 44.2 GW last year to 57 GW this year ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/gl... ). I think we have reached en masse.

> Now they're just waiting for the products to arrive en masse.

For the Phillippines, that was 2014. They went from 3 MW installed in 2013 to 117 MW in 2014 ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/ih... ).

Worldwide, installations are expected to increase from 44.2 GW last year to 57 GW this year ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/gl... ). I think we have reached en masse.

One producer expect $400/kW in a few years: http://www.pv-tech.org/news/su...

Panel prices are already well into very affordable ranges. As you say, the real work now is getting all the other parts of the cost down (wiring, mounting racks, inverters, labor, land, and paperwork - permits, planning, etc.)

The farmers turning part of the Sahara green again would disagree with you:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=farmers-in-sahel-beat-back-drought-and-climate-change-with-trees

So would Roth Capital Partners, who estimate 18 GW of photovoltaic power installations this year:

http://international.pv-tech.org/news/roth_capital_partners_forecast_pv_demand_of_18gw_in_2011_bankable_products

We are learning how to live on Earth, but it will take a generation or two to clean up all the non-sustainable crap we have at the moment.

- The company is not public, so it's pointless to ask for filings -- their investors are pros and presumably know what they are doing. If/when they do an IPO, there will be filings too.

- The tech in CIGS is proven (not just by Nanosolar but by other big players who have to be more public such as First Solar), so allegiations of vaporware ring hollow.

- There are photos and journalist reports of the new German panel factory itself, and those 640MWpeak/year will be going somewhere...

Er, scratch that. Mars Phoenix flew with ATK UltraFlex array, with Boeing Spectrolab cells
http://www.pv-tech.org/chip_shots/_a/no_juice_no_glory_inside_the_solar_arrays_powering_the_phoenix_mars_lander/

105W/Kg

Similar array is scheduled to fly on ST8
http://nmp.nasa.gov/st8/
Shooting for 175W/Kg

"Which is a crying shame considering how much uranium and easy disposal options we have. Fear trumps reason again. Cue: 30 year outdated arguments.."

The point is mute because as others have pointed out TFA claims that AGL will use renewables, however I have to object to your implied conclusion that Australia should build reactors.

Australia has both huge uranium reserves AND huge renewable potential (enough to power most of SE Asia), why not sell the uranium and disposal services to other nations that don't have such an embarrasing wealth and under-utilisation of renewables? Personally I think the shame I cry over the most is how we consitently sell taxpayer funded IP for pennies, as in the case of The Sun King. IMHO we should be selling uranium and keeping ideas, not the other way around.

The meat from the link:
"The new technology Dr Shi helped develop has now been put into commercial production at this factory near Leipzig, in Germany. But it is protected by patent - he might have helped develop it but the Sun King can't use it. Indeed the failure by Pacific Solar to commercialise the technology so disheartened Dr Shi at the time that he considered giving away research altogether and starting a restaurant or a supermarket in Sydney...[snip: but he went back home to China]...Six years later Dr Shi and his wife have transformed $6 million in seed capital into a $6 billion company. Oh, not only did we sell his invention, we even built the factory for the Germans who are now pumping about a gigawatt of EXCESS back into the grid from rooftop PV - quite an achivement considering "sunshine" is not the first thing that comes to one's mind when they think about German weather.

And while we are at it, why do we ship ore to China to smelt with coal, why not refine the metal where it is dug up using solar thermal and "value add" to our product? Even the small quantity we smelt is done with horrendous inefficiency and still makes a profit, eg: Aluminium in the south using a purpose built coal plant but the ore is dug up under the sweltering sun in the north. To get the ore from north to south there's all this infrastructure of railraods, ports and ships. If we can automate the world's largest diamond mine to operate with a dozen staff why can't we build intergrated mine/refine/power stations that take maybe 100 people to run? Plonk it on the ore deposit and away you go.

If I had my tinfoil hat on I might think that a lot of the insanity in the economy is nothing more than a "full employment" scheme for western society.

Politics: The Greens have two problems, first their nuclear dogma directly contradicts their platform of "science based policy". Second their leader is as boring as dogshit. I'm an old fart who was an adult during the Franklin thing and I admire Brown for what he did back then, I also admire him for standing up for the rule of law in the Hicks case even though Howard neutered him by branding him a "Hick's supporter". I really DO want to hear what he has to say but his voice and his predictable dogma are like auditory valium, two sentances and I'm asleep. The last time I remember him doing anything effective was the time he got the Greens locked out of parliment while the Chineese were visting, and when I say effective I mean he was effective in convincing the nation that he's a wack-job. (Not that different to how McCain has "lost his way", once that happens your credibility is dead to the casual observer and the one-eyed dogmatists are drawn to you like flies are drawn to a turd.)