“Black holes are dense”: so are the people who chant that renewables are cheaper than coal. Renewables exist only via the largesse of the long suffering taxpayer and victims of gouging power companies.

Remove the subsidies, and the con will be revealed. Actually, the people who are now paying for the most expensive electricity in the world have already had it revealed to them.

The ACCC looked at direct RE costs such as subsidies and feed in tariffs. However indirect costs may be quite substantial and help explain why emissions keep increasing. In Australia fast response open cycle gas turbines and diesel are used more than more efficient combined cycle turbines. Coal is forced to vary output away from the optimum heat rate.

That's emissions then there's frequency correction FCAS which costs $5m some weeks. In the 'bad old days' of baseload dominant power supply frequency was rarely a problem. There are also some strange goings-on with renewable energy certificates eg a steel mill's energy savings to somehow make Melbourne trams go green. In heatwaves when wind is AWOL big electricity users will now be paid generously to reduce consumption.

Most of this is kept from the public who have politely refrained from asking why emissions keep going up despite huge support for renewables. Perhaps it is a mass delusion rather than a scandal.

The problem Carmody points to is well known - renewables wreck the grid and destroy the facial incentives that ensure we have reliable power -but has always been waved away by activists as unimportant. Just put more power storage on the grid.. building X number of pumped hydro facilities won't cost very much at all. Just to get involved in the debate is to plunge deeper into this rabbit hole of fantasy and delusion.

Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Turnbull have sold out to gw madness. How the alarmist became rich? Dumb and dumber.

For once I agree with Taswegian.

Also, with author Carmody.

However, I have one minor issue, which follows. Carmody's curve breaks down when storage is introduced. Storage is like magic - it seems always to be provided by others, at no cost to the uncontrolled and unreliable, weather-dependent generators that cause it to be needed.

Let's do a rough calculation of the cost of batteries.

How much storage? Since Tony Abbott reduced the annual "renewables" target to 33,000 GWh/year, let's contemplate just one day without weather-dependent electricity. Remember, this is for only for about 25%, not 100% renewable energy in the mix. So we are still a country mile from the dream of 100%, but it's a start. It's also about 100GHh of batteries.

But at what price?

If reports are correct, then the SA battery cost $150M for 128 MWh, ie a tad over $1M/MWh.

Storage = 100GWh = 100,000MWh
Battery cost per MWh = $1M/MWh
Total cost of battery = 100,000MWh * $1,000,000/MWh = $100B.

That's 100 billion dollars for a single day of backup, and only at Tony Abbott's reduced target of about 25% renewables.

Still want 100% unreliables?

Lots of propagandized misinformation in this space!

If renewables are cheaper? When and how?

When a constant gale persists or the sun shines 24/7 above the arctic circle? But not when the long night comes and stays until spring!

Or if the government alters free and fair competition.

By #1/ Granting subsidies?

#2/ By forbidding other less costly alternatives, from getting a look in? And here I'm referring to the energy, whose name can't be spoken, i.e., nuclear energy!

No not traditional nuclear energy but something abandoned in the seventies because of the difficulty of weaponizing it. And because it threatens the livelihoods and business models of the fossil fuel industry, big nuclear and big pharma alike.

The latter threaten by miracle medicine that would cure patients all over the world who had previously been a source of endless and huge funds as curable conditions were managed until every possible cent had been wrung out of them treating accompanying pain, red-raw inflammation and almost impossible itching.

[To the point where the only remaining option was euthanasia!?]

Curable if the condition causing all the associated conditions! Is successfully treated.

In so many cases it'll be untreated untreatable cancer and cancer that therefore has spread far and wide.

Only then being able to be treated with oncology radiation, i.e., Alpha particle isotope bismuth. Which is attached to an antibody that then exclusively targets cancer. and wherever it has spread! And kills it in minutes, without harming healthy cells.

Moreover, we have been able to make this stuff for over half a century. But limited in its ALLOWED production to ensure it's both expensive and unobtainable by the majority!

Forget that in the process of making it and saving thousands of condemned lives every year, we can make electric power for as little a 2-3cents per KwH!

[Imagine the SOVEREIGN RISK inherent in that and the very reason our alleged representatives, won't have a bar of it!?]

When we can get a precious renewable to do those two aforementioned things and without subsidies, I'll be first in the queue!
TBC, Alan B.