I regret to say that a number of the state Labour governments have over the years set priorities and renewable targets that are extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic, and have paid little or no attention to energy security (Malcolm Turnbull, cited in Quince, A, Phillips, K 2016).
Currently it is stated in the media that renewable energy (RE) is not a reliable alternative for Coal: true, the Coal power has established itself as a time-tested and technically reliable practice. Nevertheless, here we will explore that despite RE is not able to support our total needs now, the ‘green’ alternatives should replace Coal because: Australia has outstanding geographical potential and advantages for RE production, there are elaborated technical decisions to put them into the practice, and this kind of energy system will be a competitive advantage for Australian economy.
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No doubts, Australia has sufficient amount of Coal (Geoscience Australia, 2014), which can also be presented as an advantage. Nevertheless, this kind of energy production implies multiple harmful effects connected both with the coal power plants work sickle (in particular CO2 emissions and the necessity of the combustion products utilisation) and the coal extraction that includes critical level of soils erosion (ref). Also we should not forget that the process of Coal extraction and transportation is quite expensive, which makes it impossible to use without current governmental subsidies (ref). In opposite, RES (renewable energy sources) are environmental friendly and free by definition, which means that after the infrastructure is built, the cost of electricity will contain just the service of the