The death of Fossil Fuels (FF) is immanent. It is now foolhardy and anti-environment in the extreme to invest in new coal mines, or coal seam gas fracking, because these activities are threatening our own health and existance, and by our strength of will they must be stopped as soon as possible. There is no need to mourn the passing of this still very rich relative of our past civilisation, or wait for a will to disburse its great wealth, because we now have a young but fast growing renewable energy industry that can tap the original source of all our energy. We have to push the old man of FF aside.

But the FF industry does not want to die. It wants to linger on for hundreds of more years, to poison the joys of life out of all of its descendents. Former PM John Howard said Australians could feel assured about their economic future, because we apparently have hundreds of years of supply of Coal and Uranium. He also said that the US was going to be an even greater global power over the next one hundred years. These statements reflected the ingratiation of a leaving Prime Minister to current major influances on government policy, and not any ability to prognosticate far into the future. These influances still maintain a stranglehold on the energy, mining and defence policies of our government.

 What we do not have is time, because at our increasing production levels of greenhouse gases, global warming of our oceans and atmosphere is accelerating. It will very soon take us past climate tipping points, which can flip our globe into new patterns of not so friendly hot climate, leaving well behind the benign interglacial era that nurtured our agricultural civilisation. Maybe this is exactly what is required to reduce human population to earth-manageable numbers, but we should not be wanting to just go down like that. The longer we continue to produce excessive greenhouse gas emissions, the more intense and longer our global punishment will be.

The BZE group is found at http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org. They are the excellent group of skilled planners, researchers, engineers, academics, project managers, who have been so concerned about Australia not having serious plans for a carbon free economy, that they have all worked together to make detailed working plans, for next to no money, and no support from industry or government. So we ask you to consider their plans. If you like them and want to help, and want a carbon free and secure energy future, either help directly, or spread the news, or send money.

Their first major publication describes exactly how to replace fossil fuel burning electricity power infrastructure with 100% renewable sources, over a 10 year time period. Using this plan will both bring our carbon emissions down fast over this emergency time period, and will set up an energy infrastructure for Australian jobs and industry, and all other parts of our economy, that is sustainable for as long as our planet can sustain us.

When this is combined with their soon to be published plans on transportation, and buildings energy efficiency, the total plan, if taken as directed by energetic minded politicians, would transform Australia from a high carbon to a low carbon economy, with positive effects on the health and well being, and jobs of everyone in Australia.

The BZE group core skillsets are fully occupied in planning activities at the moment. They do not have the time nor money to spend directly on ideas marketing and formulating political policies, or persuading politicians to change policy. Intensive political lobbying requiring lots of money, to the level and tunes of which only the very rich fossil fuel and mining companies are able to afford. The impact of BZE the political right spectrum of federal and state politics, which is most of the Liberal and Labor members, has yet to get much beyond zero.

The political failure is because career politicians care about mostly about keeping their jobs. They are adequately paid, get lots of respect, get invited to many functions, and get to make speeches, to which we are sometimes painfully forced to listen to. They also get to frequently swell their brain cells with alchohol, in which state they are told who funds them, how they are really important, and what policies are preferred, by those whom they socialise the most. And so large corporations spend top dollars on making friends with, wining and dining and influencing politicians. Independent politicians with their own ideas are a rare species, and are generally attacked savagely by right wing controlled media, which is most of Radio, TV and newspapers, or worse still, are totally ignored. So mainstream politicians try not to present ideas which will upset their major lobbyists and backers.

BZE has an uphill battle politically. The core group have much better things to do than waste time with the high poker stakes competition for seduction of politicians. The very urgent problems our global civilisation faces, and how they can be optimally addressed locally in BZE plans and models, is determined very precisely by the physical realities of Nature. The BZE group has presented what it has estimated to be the lowest cost and best scale options using currently available and working technology.

BZE approach to bring about realization of their plan is to educate the general public, about the necessity of changes, be honest about the effort and costs required, and to bring certainty to the outcomes that the plans intend to provide.

BZE hopes to spread the knowledge by direct presentations and word of mouth. Volunteers who have time and inclination are trained up by seed group members in each city, to increase the number of trained presenters and the number of people who will get to hear the details of the plans. I repeat that this is just the first and most important of several plans to transition all parts of our economy.

In what we hope will only be a few years, an investment opportunity that fits in with a BZE future will be the kinds of investment that people will approve, and put their money and votes into. Our politicians are paid to respond to public demand, and is exactly what BZE intends to bring about, by presenting a practical vision of our future.

Over the past several decades our civilisation has grown in population and total wealth. It has developed deeper hierarchies of organisation, specialisations in knowledge, jobs and career qualifications. At the top are larger monopolies of asset ownership, and concentrated ownership of media. Roaming outside our nation are large corporations that have pulled up anchor from their home nations, and now sail the globe in search of the best resource and labour deals, and the lowest local taxes. Yearly fortunes are offered for CEOs to be the most seductive and sociopathic at the same time, to bring about the biggest quarterly harvast of profit. The consumer population has also been seduced by more or less continous economic growth, media consumer culture, and our social structures are topped with displays of celebrity, wealth and power. The mutually reinforcements of media, industry and corporate money flows have become interlinked in their vested interests.

At the top levels, the global game is all about controlling assets and the money that is made from them. The overall pattern is of an energy fueled growth in size, complexity and linked dependency. This makes bringing about change difficult, if it goes against large vested financial interests. At the very top of the money tree are fossil fuel corporations, which provide most of the transportable liquid energy, and the wire transmitted electricity, without which this civilisation could not carry on for one more day. We are accordingly held to ransom by these corporations. If they stop producing, so does our economy and lifestyle. If other nations go against the economic wishes of top consuming nations, they get invaded and occupied.

The problems we have are that conservative politicians, and they and this consumer society are afraid of big changes, presaged by oncoming global warming, expensive petrol, and financial crises.

Change is happening all the time, we cannot stop the clocks. Our population is still growing. Outside, the immigration pressure is growing. There is a growing national inequality of wealth and life expectency. During the period of economic growth, where resource exploitation has proceded without reaching natural limits, everything has appeared to be fine. Now we have reached the resource limits, and a economic crunch and disruption begins.

Our political leadership is slow to adapt to tackling the challenges of resource limits. They have helped developed institutions, procedures and affiliations based on over a hundred years of resource exploitation. Australias greatest treasurers have had it easy. They have only now been brought into taking the baby steps of a carbon tax, and other measures, by means of a hung parliament, straddled by the small numbers of the greens party and a few independents.

So for all the academic rigor and brilliant presentations of BZE, for all the impression they have made on government and vested interests, it would have made no difference had they called themselves "Death to Fossil Fuels" group, wear bright yellow shirts (for solar and renewable energy of course), and joined up with the greens in an alliance. For any policy to bring about 100% renewable energy, and zero carbon emissions in ten years, in the dyslexic brains of vested interests, BZE directly translates as DFF.

DFF means that most coal mines need to be closed, because coal burning power stations are to be shut down, eventually world wide. By the time Australia completes a successful zero carbon transition, many other nations will be far ahead or close behind. There may be special material and industrial uses for some coal, such as a carbon source for making steel, but as BZE mentions, industrial processes exist which can minimize even this.

DFF means we do not need to destroy the integrity of the rock strata and poison our water table and acquifers in order to get a few years supply of coal seam gas from drill fracks all over the agricultural and populated areas of our land.

Fossil Fuel corporations are hereby now declared a threatened species. They are the most threatened species on this earth. Their extinction is required over the next one or two decades. They will otherwise become extinct by bringing about more intensive global warming, with business as usual, killing us all.

To finalize the BZE stationary energy plan for Australia requires only about 3% of our GDP over the next 10 years. The average cost to each household amounts to less than $10 a week. Doing this time, the energy basis of our civilisation can be transformed without any major electric power loss or social disruption. The plan actually requires an economic stimulus, lots of extra jobs over the construction rollout, and more employment in the years ahead in maintenence and exploitation of our energy systems. It has no long term cost on our economy. The plan requires approximately 40% of power to come from wind, and 60% of the energy from concentrated solar thermal (CST), with molten salt storage. It requires upgrades to the electricity transmission infrastructure.

The CST with molten salt storage is the initially the more costly component of the plan. The use of molten salt to store heat from concentrated solar energy is proven technology. Large storage tanks slow the energy heat loss to less than 1% over 24 hours. A hot and a cold storage tank are maintained. The heat can be dispatched from the hot storage tank to the steam turbine at anytime, day or night, to make electricity from the energy captured from the sun. The CST uses a heliostat field, an array of large flat mirror panels that track the sun during the day to focus all the heat energy on a single heat receiver, through which flows steam or molten salt to be heated to very high temperatures. Molten salt is stable at over 600 degrees C. The higher temperatures produce greater efficiency of energy transfer and electricity generation. The single tower arrangement reduces the amount of piping required between heat source, storage and electric turbines, and the energy needed to pump the fluids. Parabolic trough systems require long lengths of thinner, narrower pipes, and have a more limited intensity of heat. The main costs of CST is from the field of heliostats. Once large numbers of these are required, their construction from readily available metal and glass materials can be scaled to a low cost level by relatively simple mass production technologies.

It is certain that the cost of CST with storage systems can fall rapidly, if a large number of similar systems are planned for. It is feasible that the production of 600,000 heliostats are year could be done in a single factory.

The engineering predicts that the energy value for money for a CST tower also scales with the size of heliostat field, and temperature and size of tower heat receiver. Up to about a 220 MW system, 10 times the amount of power is obtained for 3 times the cost. There is an upper limit to the heliostat field size, with energy focus loss becoming more signficant for heliostats further away from the tower.

It is the norm in the power industry to have a number of generating units clustered together in the one facility, sharing the transmission infrastructure. It allows individual units to be taken offline as required by demand reduction, or system maintenance. BZE have designed a system that requires modules of net 217 ME turbines, with a mirror field and molten salt system storage sized for 17 hours of energy production. The design specifies air cooling of the steam used for the power cycle, in order to minimize water requirements. These solar thermal plants are capable of running at a 72% annual capacity factor, which is larger than the annual operating capacity of most large black coal plants running in Australia today.

Only twelve major solar sites around Australia are required by the plan. Each site has a installed cluster of CST modules totalling 3,500 MW. The first modules for the first site will likely be of a smaller size, due to initial setup expenses , to be in the 50-150 MW range. The target size module is to be 220 MW.

The Gemasolar plant in spain was completed this year has the same CST and storage technology as the BZE plan, and has maintained rated electricity output over 24 hour periods. The Gemsolar is not the only possible design. BrightSource is building systems that have steam heated in the solar receiver, but have the two tank molten salt storage system connected to capture heat from the steam turbine, such that stored heat is used again to heat steam for power generation.

The total stationary energy system design can provide baseload, and electricity demand gap filling power at all times. The system has been modelled using existing electricity demand, and weather data for wind and solar. BZE predicts the system can meet current and future electricity demand requirements, by using cheap wind power as much as is available, and by always meeting the demand gap by utilizing solar energy stored in the CST heat tanks. When wind power is running near full capacity, CST is storing the solar energy as heat.  When wind energy drops, stored heat is used to generate electricity. There is provision for using existing hydro power, and firing a few generators with biomass, for the very few days where wind drops and cloud cover reduces stored solar energy.

BZE did not call itself DFF, because they are too nice.  Its plans are a rational basis for environmentally sound government policy, also are address to land use and agricultural practices as carbon emission sources. A plan is being devised as to what can be done to replace export income currently derived from mining and shipping dirty coal. The plans are designed, by nature, to be none contradictory, unlike the current political outlook of cut throat business as usual.

By building a world class renewable energy infrastructure, Australia could export energy stored in materials formed from using renewable energy. We could have a better manufacturing and recycling industry. Energy gets used in all living and industrial processes. It is the prime agent of change. Nothing happens without a transfer of energy.

 Renewable energy is really important, because it appears that most of our politicians are seriously energy depleted and have no direction. So the most signficant part of the BZE plan is to build a large solar concentrated solar power station, with a field of mirrors around parliament house in Canberra, focused on a power tower directly above the main chamber, with hot molten salt piped through the members chairs. That ought create some political energy.