Yairbut renewable energy consistently gets 65-75% approval ratings in opinion polls. Therefore politicians must respond accordingly. A factoid that is often overlooked is that wind and commercial solar get $90 per Mwh LGC subsidy on top of the NEM market price. The subsidy alone is about double the full price of black coal power. Then there are other integration costs like keeping gas plant on standby using fuel inefficiently. Some dislike the way wind farms change rural vistas. So far the public is lapping it up.

I see no way that batteries can do bulk energy storage at the Gwh or even Twh level. A national level they may help for a few minutes or seconds worth of frequency control or uninterruptible power supply. For home owners the payback time must get down below the battery replacement period which seems unlikely for present versions on the market.

Thirdly our emissions are not on track to meet the promises made at climate conferences. Therefore renewable energy is not only expensive and unreliable but it is unlikely to be helped much by tinkering with batteries. It also fails in its supposed aim of significant emissions reductions.

The problem with both the article and your comment Taswegian is that the best genuine experts in the world disagree with you.

Instead of playing dog-in-the-manger, how about trying to work out why they think you're wrong?

Here's a hint to start: look forwards instead of backward. The development curve is trending steeply up for renewable technologies, contrary to Mr Moran's claim that these are mature technologies. On the other hand, coal power is a completely mature technology and as such costs are only going to rise.

Solar PV is already lower in cost than new coal and is dropping in price, where coal and other central generation is increasing.

Don't believe all you read from people paid to produce particular opinions.

oh dear another tinfoil hat wearer trying to use the utter incompetence of government and AEMO as a pretext to global warming is okay.

The problems experienced in SA are simply the grid has not been maintained in such away that there are multiple pathways and redundancies in the distribution of power. SA had plenty of power it just couldn't distribute it out.

I don't like speaking I'll of the dead but in the former head of AEMO had a public and private onion that differed as the author says then the former head was also incompetent.

What happened is SA is a great example about why a essential service like power should not be privatized. And utter incompetence in a public office should be a criminal offence.

A small celled power network with nukes, wind and solar should be the order of the day. SA should build a nuke waste dumb not for the east coast caste offs but for the spent fuel rods of it's own nuke power stations.

"... one of the highest levels in the world...", and one of the dearest. Three times the cost of coal generation! And we are supposed to listen to "experts" who cannot even tell us how much CO2 the pain will reduce in the long run. Not a very realistic ask, I suggest.

And, think of the whopping cost of replacing these wind monsters (already described) every decade or so!

Up yours, you fear-mongering "experts".

Cost reductions for realtime wind and solar may be missing the point. This article asks the question; what if they were free?
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/08/31/intermittent-renewables-cant-favorably-transform-grid-electricity/
To that I'd add
1) if they are so cheap why do they need such generous subsidies?
2) is it possible other technologies will get cheaper in time?

The subsidies exist to enable renewables to compete with the heavily subsidised coal generation model. They are needed in order to provide a short-term incentive to develop renewable technologies and will disappear in a very short time-frame.

Unlike coal and other central generation models, renewables have very low operating and maintenance costs and almost zero decommissioning costs - the vast majority of the cost is up-front.

As the manufacturing cost declines, as it does with every new technology over time, the effective lifetime cost declines. On the other hand, centralised fossil generation models, whether coal or nuclear (yes, nuclear fuel is a fossil), grow continually more expensive to build, which is the case with all fully mature technologies. The low-hanging fruit of improvement are already gone for those centralised models, while they are yet to be picked for the renewables.

It's not that hard: think about the cost of your TVs over the years. The price has remained roughly the same despite inflation and the massive improvements in both power consumption and functionality. Every new technology starts out dear and becomes cheaper over time.