Wind turbines are an embarrassing waste of resources that should have gone to energy storage technologies. Batteries, uber-capacitors, pumped or whatever. Green will not work without storage.

There are places where the location of a few wind turbines would be logical, like say on islands affected by the almost constant roaring forties, and where the surplus generation could be used to pump water to large upland reservoirs, that act as energy and or, water storage facilities.

New vastly lower costing desalination, means we could even use desalinated sea water?

King island i.e., has a ridge running along most of its length, and is in the path of the roaring forties, and placing turbines along the length and breath of that ridge makes much more sense than sending much more expensive coal fired power all the way from Melbourne to Tassie via an undersea cable!

There'd still need to be an undersea cable, but a vastly shorter one!

A few northern islands are similarly blessed, with reliable and virtually constant wind.

Populated Magnetic island comes to mind, and has plenty of mountainous terrain, where the towers could be located; and water could be stored and used when the wind doesn't blow?

And there's a larger bigger ridgeback island off the coast of Cardwell.

Of course the recalcitrant greens will roar, but hey, they're national parks!

That said, we should look for much cheaper carbon free alternatives.

Thorium power, successfully used by both India and China? Is one possible option; as is locally produced endlessly sustainable scrubbed biogas powering ceramic fuel cells.

And given the fuel is endlessly sustainable and virtually free, and provided on your very doorstep as it were, producing the cheapest domestic power in the world and equally sustainable, endlessly free hot water!

And then there's things like micro solar thermal applications, that use locally invented solar tracking to generate steam that then turns a turbine.

This intermittent power could be used to create Hydrogen that could be bladder stored to provide 24/7 on demand power.

However, why bother when things like (half price) base load thorium and or (quarter price) biogas/ceramic combinations beckon, and 24/7, even when the sun doesn't shine and or the wind doesn't blow!
Rhrosty.

Excerpt from the Executive Summary of the Submission (No 259 here: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Wind_Turbines/Wind_Turbines/Submissions ):

"... the RET Review summarised estimates of the abatement cost of the Large Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET) at $32-$70/t CO2. These estimates, however, are likely underestimated as the analyses do not appear to take effectiveness into account, or at least not fully. If the economic analyses do not take effectiveness into account, and if effectiveness decreases to 53% by 2020, the estimates of abatement cost would nearly double to $60-$136/t CO2 with effectiveness included.

To put these abatement costs in context, the ‘carbon’ tax was $24.15/t CO2 when it was rejected by the voters at the 2013 Federal election. The current price of EU ETS carbon credits and the international carbon credit futures are:
• European Union Allowance (EUA) market price (10/3/2015) = €6.83/tCO2 (A$9.50)
• Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) futures to 2020 (9/3/2015) = €0.40/tCO2 (A$0.56)

Therefore, the LRET in 2020 could be 2 to 5 times the carbon tax, which was rejected by the voters in 2013; 6 to14 times the current price of the EUA; and more than 100 times the price of CER futures out to 2020.

Clearly, the RET is a very high cost way to avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The rational policy decision is to close the RET to future investments. Or, as an interim measure, wind the target back to a real 20% of electricity generation."

Peter the inverse proportionality you claim as fact is just conjecture — and rather illogical conjecture at that! I checked your submission to see where you got it from, and you claim to have got it from Inhaber — yet when I followed your link I found no mention of it!

Aiden - I will let Peter defend himself on detail but it is certainly the case that accommodating a lot of wind will be far more expensive, in proportion, than a small amount.. 1-2 per cent is within tolerance limits of network operations. You don't have to do anything special to accommodate it - but 30 per cent is an horrific load for a spread out, isolated network like that of the Eastern states grid. A lot of investment would be required. It is also an interesting question just how much carbon would be abated..

The vexing question of optimum wind penetration seems to be a variant of the least cost combination problem. The classic example of the latter was how to feed prisoners on just three types of food at least cost. The simplex algorithm solves the problem exactly but there was no uncertainty involved unlike fickle wind power.

I think the type and flexibility of the backup determines the optimum. For example Denmark has Norwegian hydro for backup so maybe 50% penetration makes sense for them. Now in Australia there are fears of high gas prices so less flexible coal power will be favoured. That puts the optimum penetration nearer the low end, say 20%. Or perhaps sticking with gas backup it may be economic to overbuild wind power and accept some curtailment. If tough carbon constraints ultimately prevail (eg like Obama's 1000 lb CO2 per average Mwh) then the economic wind penetration could be over 30% at a pure guess.

I think the correct approach should be based on primary emission targets not subsidies and quotas like the RET. Let the players work out the optimum mix for themselves.