From the Aus:

"Turnbull’s disciplined focus on electricity prices and the unreliability of unbalanced renewable energy production is putting pressure on Labor at all levels. Mark Butler’s response yesterday, bouncing off Australia Institute and Fairfax Media claims that Turnbull had ignored “confidential” advice and set up a false narrative, was knee jerk, superficial and wrong.

While Labor tried to distract the Coalition about preference deals with One Nation, housing affordability and welfare cuts, the climate change spokesman accused Turnbull of lying about the cause of the blackouts. With the added hysterical hyperbole of doing so while people were risking their lives in the field.

But his argument, built on the morning media’s misleading momentum, didn’t acknowledge that Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg had always said the blackout was caused by the effects of a storm.

It didn’t take an FOI request to work this out — AEMO has written three public reports, with a fourth due next month, in which it is spelt out in great detail.

As Turnbull has said, the real issue is that SA’s vulnerability to extreme weather blackouts is a result of an over-reliance on wind and solar.

AEMO’s public findings, after months of study, are that the “growing proportion” of renewables is leading to longer periods of low availability of power and “lower resilience to extreme events”. The third report highlights measures required to change how “the power system responds to extreme events”.

It is the end result — which AEMO sheets home to the intermittency of wind farms — that is the real issue."

They say one good deed deserves another. Now it seems one subsidy creates another if we have to pay thermal plant to remain on standby. For coal or steam based gas plant that will mean burning fuel and creating emissions in order to keep the boilers hot. This will be a perverse result of those who insisted that wind and solar would make big inroads into emissions and cost.

The obvious answer is to remove the 'must take' status of intermittent generation due to the penalty backed quota and the economics of the generous green certificate subsidy. Now we see at least one electricity reseller will pay the $65 per Mwh shortfall charge rather than buy $85 certificates. Again the green dreamers didn't see this coming.

Perhaps no state or region should get more than about 20% wind power. We can't stop people installing solar at home provided it doesn't impose costs on others. The intermittent percentage 'sweet spot' will be found as a result of undistorted economics. In my opinion nuclear should replace coal baseload but a vocal minority can't seem to grasp that idea.

Why not use our huge latent resource of nuclear material to generate base load power? Then our renewables could be a valuable additional generator.

Thank you for the article. Obviously it took a bit of research and some of the graphs are quite telling.

However there was one important factor missing, the high price of domestic gas which is severely denting the capacity of gas fired power stations to compete in the energy market. The US only recently eased restrictions on the export of oil and gas from their country. They rightly took the position that allowing energy to be exported would cost jobs, and raise the cost of production and therefore directly impact competitiveness.

Here in Australia we did not such thing. As a result our local prices have soared from $3 to $4 to $6 to $7 sometimes fetching nearly $20 per GJ. A country with one of the most abundant gas resources now faces shortages.

These inflated prices mean plants like the Point Piper no long deem it economically viable to have both generators going full time thus removing base load capacity from the system.

“A 2012 report from NIEMIR claimed that for each dollar gained from gas exports $21 in economic activity was lost.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-01/gas-prices-higher-in-australia-than-in-export-destinations/7680106

We need to stipulate that at least 25% of gas production be reserved for domestic use. I know this is unlikely under a government so wedded to laissez faire capitalism, and that they and their rusted on minions will instead blame renewables, but ultimately we desperately need leadership on this issue.

Good article guys.. just one point. You mention the term semi-dispatchable at the end. My understanding is that wind farms over a certain capacity are classified as semi-dispatchable meaning that the grid operators have the option of not accepting its electricity if acceptance would create grid problems. Can't be turned on but can be kept off.

Electricity in all states should be taken back by governments. There is no place for profit taking a price gouging (particularly by the Chinese) when it comes to essential utilities. Back to coal and to hell with RETs and rent-seekers.