I see little chance of batteries powering aluminium smelters for very long. Those smelters who said they'd cope with 82% renewables are really saying increase the subsidies to cover the cost of the extra gas needed to make the power reliable. In May-June both wind and solar were below par in SE Australia. Let's say Australia needs just one month of energy storage call it 20 TWh, Snowy 2 being 0.35 TWh if it's ever finished. Commercial batteries have a capex of about $400 per kWh. Times 20 bn to get the cost of the month's worth of storage capacity.

Green hydrogen is also a bit of a dud as Tallawarra B is showing. Using it in a turbine gets back just 26% of the electricity that went into the electrolyser. Therefore most electricity has to be generated in real time, not stored. That's the reason we currently get around 60% of our electricity from coal baseload versus an occasional 5% from batteries according to NemWatch just now. Renewables will not replace coal in countries like Australia.

If we to coal, it will be affordable again.

We are in this mess (on all other levels to), through lack of competition in Politics.
There are no two political parties, there is only one!

Watching Albo at the Garma festival talking about new technology it occurred to me that we should start pilot programs of solar/battery energy across the North of Australia with every remote community having its own solar array with back-up batteries and getting away from the diesel generators they currently use.

If we can adequately power these small isolated communities it should tell us a whole lot about how we tackle larger communities. If it doesn't work on these communities they always have their existing diesel generators to fall back on.

Pilot programs in remote areas would not be any different from the programs we have in not-so-remote areas which, when they fail, as they often do, we have coal and gas to fall back on. I think there are still a few diesel generators about too.

The whole renewable experiment has proved to be a crock - all over the world. Our political class is just not clever enough to catch on to the fact.

Oh dear, I would have thought our masters would have woken up by now.
The proposal that we extend the remote communities schemes to the rest
of us just does not work. They do not live in multistory buildings
with perhaps three lifts.
Their power consumption fits their lifestyle.
They do not catch an electric train to work or go up 25 floors in a lift.
Then he had a bright idea; bring in an extra 1 million migrants !
Probably with minium securiet checks. Oh dear oh dear !
There s no escaping it !
We are in for an economic collapse with increasing demand and decreasing supply.
It is true Albo said the difference between the aboriginal lifestyle
and our lifestyle would decrease.
He was dead right but not the way he thinks.
He is too STUPID to understand the difference.