Another One Bites The Dust  

I s'pose that when you have to build your business on the actual virtues of your product it's a bit harder than when you can just rely on huge handouts from the public pocket :)

The Australian farm lobby certainly hasn't been as successful as the US one at getting subsidies showered upon them.

I still think its bizarre that no one has managed to produce ethanol using sugar cane in Queensland though. Surely we could do it for the same price as Brazil - and that has to be economic. Its enough to get me started down the tinfoil path...

But I'm not surprised the grain to ethanol and soy/palm oil/tallow to biodiesel people have failed - especially given the harsh tax treatment meted out to the biodiesel folk.

I reckon it's simple old Australian economic conservatism - conservatism in the sense of "that's new, we don't want that." You'll remember that Chinese bloke whose brilliant new PV cells weren't developed by the company he worked for in Australia, and were in fact sold to Germany, who now exports those cells to us... while the Chinese bloke went back to China, got $6 million starting money and now runs a PV cell company worth $6 billion... But we don't want that sort of thing in Australia! That's new!

From what I've seen, you get that a lot in Aussie businesses, from the corner shop to BHP. New stuff scares them. That's why 107 years after Federation we're still exporting raw materials and importing manufactured goods like... well, a colony is supposed to.

All true alas.

I think losing Ausra to Vinod Khosla and the US was an even worse loss than the PV guy. CSP will be the big source of power down the track - especially in Oz.