Stories of a short, fat bastard.

It's also got the same downside as most renewables do: geographically limited static generation sources combined with transmission losses. There's a lot of cable between the central desert hot zones and Sydney.

Most of Australia is actually fairly low-temp, geothermically speaking: being so far from the plate boundaries is wonderfully convenient when it comes to avoiding earthquakes and volcanoes, but it means that we've got a lot of continental crust between us and the mantle.

It's probably still got a part to play, though. It seems likely that it isn't going to be one single source of energy that we rely on in the future; it'll probably be a combination of whatever's viable locally.

Nuclear is probably going to play some part, as well. It's just another short-term fossil fuel in the end; Australia holds about 30% of the world's uranium, but even at the controlled rate that we're digging it up now it'll all be gone within about a hundred years. If there's a significant shift in the world's energy burden from oil to nuclear [1] then that exploitation rate is going to accelerate exponentially, so I'd guess that nuclear power is nothing more than a fifty to seventy year stopgap at best. [2]

And, for those seventy years, Australia effectively becomes Saudi Arabia. Won't that be interesting? [3]

Despite nuclear's limited lifespan, it could provide just enough time for us to get renewables working. It's likely that we're going to have to seriously look at energy usage, as well: the common American conception of air conditioning as a basic human right simply isn't sustainable. There's a limit to how much we can insulate ourselves from the world and survive.

[1] Which there almost certainly will be; we're at the start of the oil crash right now, renewables aren't sufficiently developed yet, and pollution issues make increasing coal use utterly suicidal.

[2] There remains the possibility of finding a lot more uranium somewhere. We'll certainly find some if we concentrate on looking; whether it's enough is another matter. Personally, I'd rather not base the future of the planet on a fuel that "might" be there, and is ultimately going to run out anyway. It's also worth noting that the limit of our uranium isn't "how much is in the planet?", it's "how much can we find and extract without using more energy than we'd produce from it?".

[3] Politically, especially. Australia isn't physically capable of supporting a population large enough to effectively defend it. We're likely to end up even more of a U.S. client state than we are already.