By the time pollution gets to the point where people are suing for damages it's usually too late. Have you sued anyone for reduced life due to air pollution?
Bicycling would be suicidal, and I live in a temperate area so bicycling would be miserable much of the time.
Perhaps it is dangerous because people like you clog the roads and act dangerously (i.e. drive a truck to work)? I live in a temperate area, and the only things that make riding unpleasant are commuters driving and strong wind (rain is actually really nice on a bike, ditto cold, hot is nice up to about 42C). Strong wind could be ameliorated in a bike friendly town by providing sheltered bike paths (grow trees either side perhaps).
Perhaps you should try it. (You might also consider using the return key)
For rapid charging there are a number of existing battery technologies that will meet your requirements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_batter y can be refilled just like petrol. Swap over batteries can have recharge times measured in seconds and having charging equipment provided in carparks makes the charging time far less important.
For me, most of my trips are less than 50km, I'd be quite happy to hire a petrol car for holidays. I could then hire a big comfy 4wd and go camping, but avoid the on costs.
Frankly, the LESS users we have, the better, as it cuts down on the things distracting us from producing better code, better programs. Time.
Yep, I've tried explaining this to 'more users at all costs' people and it never sinks in. A successful free software project attracts lots of developers, not lots of users.
Ok, I'm probably ill advised about the problems with nuclear, but I still think that we're better off reducing our energy demand rather than continuing down the path we are on. Things like lawns, shipping tomatos around the world and designing everything to be thrown away are examples of silly conspicuous consumption.
So from their POV, human habitation is far worse than nuclear waste.
History seems to show that human habitation is far worse for everything else. I'm suggesting we should try and reverse that, rather that bringing in more and more brute force solutions. I wish I knew how.
Right, so as I've said in other responses, you followed the text book designs, which are a) expensive (particularly if you use glass!) and b) rarely give better than 10% offset to heating bills c) fail to work well even in theory. You live in your solar store, which makes it hard to keep warm in winter and hard to keep cool in summer. Living in the solar store requires far more thermal mass because you want to restrict the temperature variation which gives you less storage per J. Keeping your storage separate in an insulated box means you can heat it to say 50C with the attendant decrease in space.
You also have your collector connected to the living area. This means that it is hard to control the heating rate. It means that you tend to lose your energy gains over night and on cloudy days. You want to use your collector as a window too, which means you need to use expensive and fragile materials.
Here's one analysis trying to separate out the issues:
As an alternative, my friend's house's roof was breaking down. It was old cement tiles and they are very brittle and replacements unavailable. He was looking at zincalume/colourbond roof iron ($20/m^2), I instead proposed clear polycarbonate($10/m^2). When the sun is shining he can move heat from the roof using a large, slow ceiling type fan. Then it's colder in the roof the fan stops and the louvres close. The normal ceiling insulation provides the same insulation it did with the tiles, but now he can collect 100kW of heat when the sun is shining. In summer some 2' square louvres on the side let out the heat.
At first he thought I was mad (well I am) but within a week he'd come back with pricing and within two weeks he'd done it. It cost him less than 3k (compared with 12k for replacement with tiles).
He paid less for the passive solar solution than for roof iron, could install it himself without a permit, on an existing house, he can sit in the attic and look at the stars or the storm, it doesn't over heat in summer (no hotter than under tiles) and polycarbonate is quite hail proof (if it is damaged, it would have damaged the iron or tiles too, so he's still better off). The neighbours still think he's got roof iron rather than polycarbonate:)
The basic problem is that people that came up with textbook passive solar (solar thermal) designs haven't actually done the design process. It's akin to the pain caused by web sites with javascript programmed by graphic designers, only far worse because we're talking about once off, hard to change designs. The first thing to do is to throw away your textbook and start thinking about the problem as a scientist and engineer.
Yeah, I see where you are coming from, but my point was that perhaps we (society) should design things to be reused more. Breaking things down takes a lot of energy. The simpler version, thermal depolymerisation can break down most organics and separate out the inorganics, and doesn't require nearly as much energy to do so, and there are various refinement processes that break class of metals down into constituents. However, ionising everything and separating with mass spec would use hideous amounts of energy unless you could reclaim the ionisation and thermal energy at the end. It's really only viable where chemical methods fail (such as separating isotopes). If we had scadloads of energy, yes we could do it, but it is akin to renovating your house by grinding it up into little pieces and regluing them together.
I wonder how we could work out how much energy is required? The ironisation potential of iron is 750kJ/mol or so, and I think the vapourisation energy is about the same as water, 2.5MJ/g. We would need to accelerate the ions to a fair speed (emitting unrecoverable radiation) in a high vacuum.
Plastic recycling is fairly advanced btw, I think the big problem, as you point out, is separation. Polystyrene foam can be reused over and over with very little energy (they basically just crumble it up, wash it and remould with steam - I've seen a factory where this is done). Clear PET can be recycled as bottles for food as long as it is properly clean and dry and doesn't contain certain other plastics.
That site doesn't give the Energy Returned on Energy Expected for the various sources though. How much energy is required to extract 3ppb U from sea water compared to the energy it delivers (this should be easy to work out, I'll leave it to you:)? It seems believable that if they think we're looking at something like $480/kg for extraction then presumably it requires no more than $480/($0.14/kWh) energy to extract. I believe that there is enough fuel around, that is not the cause for my concerns about nuclear energy.
By fusion I was referring to the large, stable fusion reactor that powers the planet (the sun). I'm strongly of the belief that for very little expenditure and a great deal of cleverness we can meet our energy demands using the sun. This is because I think that:
the amount of energy we use currently is vastly greater than we need to use, without even a cost to our standard of living.
solar technology is still in the dark ages research wise (excluding exotic stuff like PV, there is no funding for solar technologies).
existing designs are woefully inefficient (a standard architect designed 'passive solar' house might offset 10% of its heating bills for 20k extra work.
I can design, model and test solar thermal stuff for a few hundred dollars and immediately start reducing my carbon emissions. Consider it like over-clocking, ricing or sailing, only it makes money.
This is mostly a result of really cheap energy (including hidden subsidies), a lack of suitable materials (good, cheap glazes were unheard of 50 years ago), failure to apply proper engineering design and modeling to designs (trombe walls are commonly cited as good design when they are clearly broken even in the idealised model), and the development of lots of one off dubious contraptions made using unrepeatable resources. "My $10 solar tracker works using this dentist chair I picked up for free"...
Breaking down a glass bottle into individual atoms seems rather silly when we might reuse it for a few joules of effort with a bottle brush. I think these ideas are more born from star trek type fantasy than real world reality. To me the measure of a civilisation is not how much they use, but how much is created, and increasing efficiency seems a better route for this. (Much like sending tiny robots to other planets rather than people) If we were careful about our resource usage to begin with, recycling wouldn't be needed.
People spent the weekend up at the local race track doing burn outs to the extent that the air was thick with burnt rubber. Is our current use of energy a similar pointless display of affluence? Can we learn anything from the Easter islanders who cut down all their trees to make ceremonial boats? Ask Jared Diamond...
Does anyone know where this number of between 50 and 100 years comes from?
You take the current proven resources, the generation conversion rate of current reactors and the current world energy demand. I don't think it includes demand growth. If we assume average european energy demand times the world population it's even smaller. Without involking breeder type systems or some new low density source I think these numbers are reasonable. We use a lot of energy!
I wasn't aware that Pu240 poisoned bombs. But I'm a fusion researcher, not a fission researcher;)
If we're going to be growing vast areas of algae, perhaps it would be good to combine with algaldiesel production.
I'm told that the waste problem is actually solved by other posters, so I guess it's not an issue any more.
I was not aware that australia did the refinement here. In that case I think you are probably right. I'm not convinced that it is fair to assume that Iran wants to make bombs rather than be energy independant. Not every country can afford to go to war with every other country that threatens their standard of living.
You need to price out a system for a home and find out just how prohibitive it is. Oh, and how often do you get hail in your area? What's the attrition rate of panels going to be just from weather, let alone electrical and other mechanical failures?
You've fallen in the same trap I mentioned in the previous line. I was referring to solar thermal energy (solar heating, aka passive solar). This alone can offset half or more of the domestic energy needs firstworldwide. The rest of your post indicates you haven't thought about the issues and are knee jerking without reading. The pay off of my own solar thermal system (ignoring the fact that it is useful for other reasons, such as more floor space) is about 6 months. For comparison, none of the UK nuclear power stations have 'paid off' yet, requiring constant govt subsidies.
The grandparents '48 tons' (american tons, I assume), if we assume waste is 25% the density of uranium (I have no clue what it really is), comes to a cube half a meter per side per year per power plant. Also very small, right?
You have: 48ton / ((0.5m)^3) You want:
Definition: 348358.94 kg / m^3
Compare with water, density 1000ishkg/m^3 and osmium (the densest substance known, I think) at 22000kg/m^3
I think you made a mistake. Or you are converting the waste to pure neutrons.
I don't read the blogosphere, I came independantly to this conclusion. Would selling uranium to Iran, Syria, North Korea or $other_evil_axis_country constitute a proliferation risk? They all need clean energy too.
In what way is passive solar (I personally dislike the term 'passive solar', lets call it solar thermal instead) not enough? Heating demand diminishes as density increases and it seems reasonable to assume that if people actually considered such issues for building permits the system would settle to an appropriate equilibrium.
Jeavons paradox would imply that solar thermal is a good thing - by reducing the cost of energy new things are possible (you suggest larger houses). That sounds like a good thing to me, certainly no different to the claims of too-cheap-to-meter electricity. If people started seriously using solar thermal maybe we could avoid building new power stations for many years?
Ok, it's good to know that the waste issue has been solved. If only we could do the same with low level consumer wastes.
I'm not concerned about the nuclear power station itself but instead the 100km of transmission lines in between, the 1000km supply train and the 1000km waste disposal train. The longford gas disaster shows the danger of centralised energy (and your point about the water supply similarly the problems with centralised water). I think it is better to try and use energy available locally before bringing energy around the world.
We can store a lot of energy in warm water for each dollar spent. A tank of water sitting in the basement can store 2GJ of heat and would cost less than $1k to build. For comparison a thousand dollars would buy me about 200Ahour @ 24V, storing 17MJ.
So you have no issues with Iran building new reactors? I'm personally quite puzzled to hear in the news that Australia is looking to sell Uranium to India and China, and practically in the same breath decrying Iran's extension of their nuclear fuel processing plant.
Similarly people point out that U235 is not up to our predicted unmodified energy use (estimates of less than 70 years are commonly touted), to which nuclear advocates then suggest fast breeders - which produce easily purified plutonium, easily manufactured into bombs - or searching for more dilute sources of U235 requiring vast mining operations (and nobody mentions the oil required to power the diggers) with their attendant environmental disruption.
Nor have we solved the waste storage problem - nuclear power produces large amounts of low grade waste (such as contaminated overalls) which we just keep shuffling around. Nuclear energy currently contributes somewhere around 10% of the total world energy, so the waste problem will get 10 times worse if we use nuclear wholesale. Considering the current handling of things like electronics waste I have no confidence that the situation will improve.
Considering that half or more of domestic energy use is to make low grade thermal energy (space heating and DHW), and that people have demonstrated hundreds of practical and effective solar heating systems (for example, the Barra design in italy, sunspace and solar closet designs, clear attic collectors with radiant ceiling storage), I wonder why a rational environmentalist isn't promoting those instead? One reason perhaps is that solar energy is constantly hijacked by PV enthusiasts who go off talking about PV arrays in the desert and other giant projects. These cost lots of money, are dubious economically and move the problem out into some location requiring massive infrastructure investment.
Putting energy in a centralised location automatically makes it a target for terrorist and economic attack. Most of the US's foreign policy behaviour in the last 6 years is directly linked to the fear of loss of resources, particularly oil, but energy in general. So far bombing and threatening other countries with energy resources has worked to a degree, but it is burning international good will instead. Switching from one foreign energy source to another seems rather foolish in this light.
If we need most energy as low grade heat, why not generate that heat locally using the one resource available everywhere: the sun. The remainder might be well served by existing renewable technologies.
The worst per capita is Australia. Talk about a place that has lots of empty space for wind farms and solar! Again you have the issue with great distances and a high standard of living. I also don't know if Australia has the hydro-electric resources that the US and Canada have.
We don't have the hydro resources of canada or the US, but we do have a climate with less 1200 HDD (compared with the US average of something like 6000) and we have some of the sunniest weather in the world. So we have vast room for improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time pollution gets to the point where people are suing for damages it's usually too late. Have you sued anyone for reduced life due to air pollution?
Hire a gas powered car... What do you do when you want to travel across water?
That's 16KJ.
:) (And yes, you can get electric assist bikes)
Actually, it's 57MJ. (or 16kWh)
So this means you have to pump this back into the grid and take the transmission losses.
No, because the electricity would most likely be used locally. In fact you would be reducing losses.
A person riding a bike at a relaxed pace uses about 200W. 16kWh corresponds to 80 hours of bike riding
Bicycling would be suicidal, and I live in a temperate area so bicycling would be miserable much of the time.
Perhaps it is dangerous because people like you clog the roads and act dangerously (i.e. drive a truck to work)? I live in a temperate area, and the only things that make riding unpleasant are commuters driving and strong wind (rain is actually really nice on a bike, ditto cold, hot is nice up to about 42C). Strong wind could be ameliorated in a bike friendly town by providing sheltered bike paths (grow trees either side perhaps).
Perhaps you should try it. (You might also consider using the return key)
Oh, and the Prius has NiMH batteries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prius
For rapid charging there are a number of existing battery technologies that will meet your requirements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_batter y can be refilled just like petrol. Swap over batteries can have recharge times measured in seconds and having charging equipment provided in carparks makes the charging time far less important.
For me, most of my trips are less than 50km, I'd be quite happy to hire a petrol car for holidays. I could then hire a big comfy 4wd and go camping, but avoid the on costs.
Vanadium redox batteries are probably a better 'solution'.
Frankly, the LESS users we have, the better, as it cuts down on the things distracting us from producing better code, better programs. Time.
Yep, I've tried explaining this to 'more users at all costs' people and it never sinks in. A successful free software project attracts lots of developers, not lots of users.
Did you make a bug report and follow it up?
So then can we assume this will be the long desired porn-centric distro we have all been waiting for?
Yes, but it's going to be well-dressed animal porn...
Ok, I'm probably ill advised about the problems with nuclear, but I still think that we're better off reducing our energy demand rather than continuing down the path we are on. Things like lawns, shipping tomatos around the world and designing everything to be thrown away are examples of silly conspicuous consumption.
So from their POV, human habitation is far worse than nuclear waste.
History seems to show that human habitation is far worse for everything else. I'm suggesting we should try and reverse that, rather that bringing in more and more brute force solutions. I wish I knew how.
doesn't have to have a toad from the office or authentication central inside it.
But a newt or duck is fine?
Right, so as I've said in other responses, you followed the text book designs, which are a) expensive (particularly if you use glass!) and b) rarely give better than 10% offset to heating bills c) fail to work well even in theory. You live in your solar store, which makes it hard to keep warm in winter and hard to keep cool in summer. Living in the solar store requires far more thermal mass because you want to restrict the temperature variation which gives you less storage per J. Keeping your storage separate in an insulated box means you can heat it to say 50C with the attendant decrease in space.
m l
:)
You also have your collector connected to the living area. This means that it is hard to control the heating rate. It means that you tend to lose your energy gains over night and on cloudy days. You want to use your collector as a window too, which means you need to use expensive and fragile materials.
Here's one analysis trying to separate out the issues:
http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/solar/solar.ht
As an alternative, my friend's house's roof was breaking down. It was old cement tiles and they are very brittle and replacements unavailable. He was looking at zincalume/colourbond roof iron ($20/m^2), I instead proposed clear polycarbonate($10/m^2). When the sun is shining he can move heat from the roof using a large, slow ceiling type fan. Then it's colder in the roof the fan stops and the louvres close. The normal ceiling insulation provides the same insulation it did with the tiles, but now he can collect 100kW of heat when the sun is shining. In summer some 2' square louvres on the side let out the heat.
At first he thought I was mad (well I am) but within a week he'd come back with pricing and within two weeks he'd done it. It cost him less than 3k (compared with 12k for replacement with tiles).
He paid less for the passive solar solution than for roof iron, could install it himself without a permit, on an existing house, he can sit in the attic and look at the stars or the storm, it doesn't over heat in summer (no hotter than under tiles) and polycarbonate is quite hail proof (if it is damaged, it would have damaged the iron or tiles too, so he's still better off). The neighbours still think he's got roof iron rather than polycarbonate
The basic problem is that people that came up with textbook passive solar (solar thermal) designs haven't actually done the design process. It's akin to the pain caused by web sites with javascript programmed by graphic designers, only far worse because we're talking about once off, hard to change designs. The first thing to do is to throw away your textbook and start thinking about the problem as a scientist and engineer.
Yeah, I see where you are coming from, but my point was that perhaps we (society) should design things to be reused more. Breaking things down takes a lot of energy. The simpler version, thermal depolymerisation can break down most organics and separate out the inorganics, and doesn't require nearly as much energy to do so, and there are various refinement processes that break class of metals down into constituents. However, ionising everything and separating with mass spec would use hideous amounts of energy unless you could reclaim the ionisation and thermal energy at the end. It's really only viable where chemical methods fail (such as separating isotopes). If we had scadloads of energy, yes we could do it, but it is akin to renovating your house by grinding it up into little pieces and regluing them together.
I wonder how we could work out how much energy is required? The ironisation potential of iron is 750kJ/mol or so, and I think the vapourisation energy is about the same as water, 2.5MJ/g. We would need to accelerate the ions to a fair speed (emitting unrecoverable radiation) in a high vacuum.
Plastic recycling is fairly advanced btw, I think the big problem, as you point out, is separation. Polystyrene foam can be reused over and over with very little energy (they basically just crumble it up, wash it and remould with steam - I've seen a factory where this is done). Clear PET can be recycled as bottles for food as long as it is properly clean and dry and doesn't contain certain other plastics.
By fusion I was referring to the large, stable fusion reactor that powers the planet (the sun). I'm strongly of the belief that for very little expenditure and a great deal of cleverness we can meet our energy demands using the sun. This is because I think that:
This is mostly a result of really cheap energy (including hidden subsidies), a lack of suitable materials (good, cheap glazes were unheard of 50 years ago), failure to apply proper engineering design and modeling to designs (trombe walls are commonly cited as good design when they are clearly broken even in the idealised model), and the development of lots of one off dubious contraptions made using unrepeatable resources. "My $10 solar tracker works using this dentist chair I picked up for free"...
Breaking down a glass bottle into individual atoms seems rather silly when we might reuse it for a few joules of effort with a bottle brush. I think these ideas are more born from star trek type fantasy than real world reality. To me the measure of a civilisation is not how much they use, but how much is created, and increasing efficiency seems a better route for this. (Much like sending tiny robots to other planets rather than people) If we were careful about our resource usage to begin with, recycling wouldn't be needed.
People spent the weekend up at the local race track doing burn outs to the extent that the air was thick with burnt rubber. Is our current use of energy a similar pointless display of affluence? Can we learn anything from the Easter islanders who cut down all their trees to make ceremonial boats? Ask Jared Diamond...
Very nice! This is the sort of thing we should be looking for!
Does anyone know where this number of between 50 and 100 years comes from?
;)
You take the current proven resources, the generation conversion rate of current reactors and the current world energy demand. I don't think it includes demand growth. If we assume average european energy demand times the world population it's even smaller. Without involking breeder type systems or some new low density source I think these numbers are reasonable. We use a lot of energy!
I wasn't aware that Pu240 poisoned bombs. But I'm a fusion researcher, not a fission researcher
If we're going to be growing vast areas of algae, perhaps it would be good to combine with algaldiesel production.
I'm told that the waste problem is actually solved by other posters, so I guess it's not an issue any more.
I was not aware that australia did the refinement here. In that case I think you are probably right. I'm not convinced that it is fair to assume that Iran wants to make bombs rather than be energy independant. Not every country can afford to go to war with every other country that threatens their standard of living.
You need to price out a system for a home and find out just how prohibitive it is. Oh, and how often do you get hail in your area? What's the attrition rate of panels going to be just from weather, let alone electrical and other mechanical failures?
You've fallen in the same trap I mentioned in the previous line. I was referring to solar thermal energy (solar heating, aka passive solar). This alone can offset half or more of the domestic energy needs firstworldwide. The rest of your post indicates you haven't thought about the issues and are knee jerking without reading. The pay off of my own solar thermal system (ignoring the fact that it is useful for other reasons, such as more floor space) is about 6 months. For comparison, none of the UK nuclear power stations have 'paid off' yet, requiring constant govt subsidies.
The US Govt ( at least bush) is also trying to sell uranium to India
Ouch.
The grandparents '48 tons' (american tons, I assume), if we assume waste is 25% the density of uranium (I have no clue what it really is), comes to a cube half a meter per side per year per power plant. Also very small, right?
You have: 48ton / ((0.5m)^3)
You want:
Definition: 348358.94 kg / m^3
Compare with water, density 1000ishkg/m^3 and osmium (the densest substance known, I think) at 22000kg/m^3
I think you made a mistake. Or you are converting the waste to pure neutrons.
Actually, I have :) And based on TMY data it isn't as bad as it seems. I haven't lived at the poles though.
I don't read the blogosphere, I came independantly to this conclusion. Would selling uranium to Iran, Syria, North Korea or $other_evil_axis_country constitute a proliferation risk? They all need clean energy too.
In what way is passive solar (I personally dislike the term 'passive solar', lets call it solar thermal instead) not enough? Heating demand diminishes as density increases and it seems reasonable to assume that if people actually considered such issues for building permits the system would settle to an appropriate equilibrium.
Jeavons paradox would imply that solar thermal is a good thing - by reducing the cost of energy new things are possible (you suggest larger houses). That sounds like a good thing to me, certainly no different to the claims of too-cheap-to-meter electricity. If people started seriously using solar thermal maybe we could avoid building new power stations for many years?
Ok, it's good to know that the waste issue has been solved. If only we could do the same with low level consumer wastes.
I'm not concerned about the nuclear power station itself but instead the 100km of transmission lines in between, the 1000km supply train and the 1000km waste disposal train. The longford gas disaster shows the danger of centralised energy (and your point about the water supply similarly the problems with centralised water). I think it is better to try and use energy available locally before bringing energy around the world.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18335 6&cid=15145482
We can store a lot of energy in warm water for each dollar spent. A tank of water sitting in the basement can store 2GJ of heat and would cost less than $1k to build. For comparison a thousand dollars would buy me about 200Ahour @ 24V, storing 17MJ.
So you have no issues with Iran building new reactors? I'm personally quite puzzled to hear in the news that Australia is looking to sell Uranium to India and China, and practically in the same breath decrying Iran's extension of their nuclear fuel processing plant.
Similarly people point out that U235 is not up to our predicted unmodified energy use (estimates of less than 70 years are commonly touted), to which nuclear advocates then suggest fast breeders - which produce easily purified plutonium, easily manufactured into bombs - or searching for more dilute sources of U235 requiring vast mining operations (and nobody mentions the oil required to power the diggers) with their attendant environmental disruption.
Nor have we solved the waste storage problem - nuclear power produces large amounts of low grade waste (such as contaminated overalls) which we just keep shuffling around. Nuclear energy currently contributes somewhere around 10% of the total world energy, so the waste problem will get 10 times worse if we use nuclear wholesale. Considering the current handling of things like electronics waste I have no confidence that the situation will improve.
Considering that half or more of domestic energy use is to make low grade thermal energy (space heating and DHW), and that people have demonstrated hundreds of practical and effective solar heating systems (for example, the Barra design in italy, sunspace and solar closet designs, clear attic collectors with radiant ceiling storage), I wonder why a rational environmentalist isn't promoting those instead? One reason perhaps is that solar energy is constantly hijacked by PV enthusiasts who go off talking about PV arrays in the desert and other giant projects. These cost lots of money, are dubious economically and move the problem out into some location requiring massive infrastructure investment.
Putting energy in a centralised location automatically makes it a target for terrorist and economic attack. Most of the US's foreign policy behaviour in the last 6 years is directly linked to the fear of loss of resources, particularly oil, but energy in general. So far bombing and threatening other countries with energy resources has worked to a degree, but it is burning international good will instead. Switching from one foreign energy source to another seems rather foolish in this light.
If we need most energy as low grade heat, why not generate that heat locally using the one resource available everywhere: the sun. The remainder might be well served by existing renewable technologies.
The worst per capita is Australia. Talk about a place that has lots of empty space for wind farms and solar! Again you have the issue with great distances and a high standard of living. I also don't know if Australia has the hydro-electric resources that the US and Canada have.
We don't have the hydro resources of canada or the US, but we do have a climate with less 1200 HDD (compared with the US average of something like 6000) and we have some of the sunniest weather in the world. So we have vast room for improvement.