Luciferase.

You miss my point about hydro: turbine capacity can be increased without increasing dam capacity. Doing so would greatly decrease the storage requirements for wind and solar PV.

And your working assumption that there's no scalable, affordable storage in sight is far from sensible. Batteries have already started being used on the grid. There is a lot of battery R&D that's bringing the price down. And there's no good reason to assume prices won't continue to fall. And as there are different competing technologies, scalability shouldn't be a problem.

Providing energy for fuel production is NOT the only valid reason all that could exist for renewables meeting more than instataneous 100% of load requirement in SA. Fuel synthesis is certainly a worthwhile load balancing activity, but there are other heavy industries that could operate in a similar way. Furthermore, even without demand for the excess supply, occasions when it's both very sunny and very windy are rare. Having to curtail wind power 1% of the time wouldn't really be so bad.

Asserting something to be preposterous merely because of its size seems to me to be a symptom of small mindedness. And I'm certainly unimpressed by Weatherill's performance, though the opposition are very often worse (as can be seen by their vehement opposition to a nuclear waste storage facility).

What we already see in the LRET is feedin tariffs making renewables more financially viable. While that has some economic merit (as it puts downward pressure on electricity prices) it is totally different to what I'm advocating. I want renewables to be made more economically viable by reducing the financiers' cut; removing a big inefficiency rather than compensating for it.

Making SA completely reliant on imported electricity leaves the state vulnerable to supply disruptions, and is also bad for the employment rate. Plus the running cost of renewables tends to be below that of nuclear. It's only when population density is such that the best sites for renewables become unavailable that nuclear has the advantage.

Shadow,

Since when have CCGTs been less adaptable to swinging load than coal fired power stations? The problem isn't the lack of technical adaptability; it's the relative price of gas and coal. Indeed SA's heavy reliance on gas is a much bigger reason for SA's high electricity prices than the high proportion of wind power. It's certainly a bigger reason than these alleged promises to Pelican Point which (if they are real) have not yet had any significant impact on electricity prices.

Pelican Point (which is on a peninsula not an island) is unlikely to need financial incentives once Hazelwood closes.

As for businesses collapsing, that has much more to do with federal government policy than what the state government does.

I won't debate hydro, Aidan. If you want to argue it's capable of load following wind and solar to make most of Australia emissions free, start another thread, and good luck.

Re "Asserting something to be preposterous merely because of its size seems to me to be a symptom of small mindedness".

Small-mindedness is secular thinking on electricity by each separate state.

Small-mindedness is failing to grasp how much RE with storage is required to meet current and growing world electricity needs, and do so without requiring as much energy input (with attendant emissions)to produce the infrastructure as energy it's capable of producing (with attendant emissions abatement).

The word "preposterous" is an understatement.

You envisage the day, no doubt, when renewable energy breeds all new renewable infrastructure. Meanwhile some of us are trying to avert CAGW.

Aidan,

Actually, the flexibility of the coal fired generators does hinge around their large scale efficiencies and low fuel cost. Keeping boilers hot and ready to go requires proportionally a far lower cost than for CCGT. As I said before, in Germany the CCGT suppliers are those going to the wall.

Secondly, having worked in heavy industry all my life, there is little to no room to be flexible on power consumption.