Battery FCAS provides a few seconds interim power before the big generators can cut in. Then they are spent until they can recharge perhaps a day later. If they can make money doing that without special rules in their favour well and good.

If as some claim the Hornsdale battery cost $50m for 129 Mwh the unit capex is nearly $400 per kwh. Opinions differ on how much energy storage is required for a 100% renewable grid. Some say storage needs to be 10% of annual demand so for Australia call 10% of 257 Twh as 26 Twh or 26 bn kwh. Times $400 per kwh is $10.4 trillion. Play around with the figures but you'll always get an astronomical result.

What with essential aircon, population growth and millions of EVs Australia will need to get at least 60% of its low carbon power from nuclear. We can grasp that now or later when the panic sets in.

What a joke! What fools we are! Once we had reliable, cheap electricity powered by coal. We could have also had nuclear power plants. But now, well we have ugly great structures relying on wind - much as they did to grind grain in the Middle Ages. We also have ugly, shiny things on roofs to attract the Sun God. And there are batteries in case the Gods deny us power, but we have to keep praying to the Sun and Wind God's that their magic starts working before the batteries run down because there is no way to recharge them.

When are we going to copy the old Cargo Cults of Papua New Guinea, and build more airstrips so that big birds will come out of the sky and disgorge supplies?

What about a generating system of a few million "numb rays" in an aquarium system stretching across the Australian continent.

At a capacitor discharge rate of six hundred volts each ray, my experience with these lively generators over the years, tells me they could definately light a few suburban households during peak hours.

(And no doubt there will be clowns that think this is a stupid idea: But stupid by comparison to what)?

A vote for renewables is a vote for gas.

Scalable, viable storage is the Achilles heel of the ideology. Belief that it will come is religious.

For all the good the supposedly inevitable "Transition" will achieve HELE is just as good, not that I am advocate as zero emissions is the aim.

Under the proposed NEG, retailers and generators must sign contracts that create a 26 per cent reduction in their emissions by 2030 with a reliability obligation. This can be achieved with renewables plus gas or HELE, neither of which will bring us any closer to zero emissions.

Instead of pussying about with half-measures involving gas and HELE, the nuclear question should be raised as the only true solution. Australia has just as great a natural advantage with nuclear energy as it does with coal, and this should be exploited

A cost analysis that fails to recognise that batteries are charged when power is cheap and used at the times it's more expensive (and would be more expensive still were it not for the batteries).

Garbage in, garbage out!

I read some time ago, about a massive private enterprise solar thermal power project, in California. That more than matched coal for price per MWh and dispatchable baseload power. XXX Ostensibly, by the use of giant vacuum flasks that retained white-hot, molten salt that retained boiler heat for up to seven days. Another in Arizona, that applied similar principles. XXX One thing we have plenty of is sundrenched deserts. XXX Moreover, we're informed a square kilometre of solar thermal arrays would power all of Australia if the project included heat retaining salt banks and automated production of the polished steel mirrors. XXX And using the California example for no more than a comparable coal-fired plant! Always providing you're prepared to wear the transmission lines and their losses. XXX More later. XXX Alan B.