Shadow: "When the coal generator and Pelican point closed down, it was blindingly obvious that the network, which had little to no improvements in nearly 2 decades was hopelessly inadequate."

You have no evidence that there has been no improvement for 2 decades. As I said before in 2002 another connector, Murraylink was built in 2002 and in 2015 the AEMO reported that there were no issues in the capacity of the connectors.

The decision to not fire up Pelican Point in the last outage was entirely an economic/ideology/political issue unrelated to the renewable supply. The problem is that the feds have deliberately chosen a strategy to undermine renewables by ensuring that national infrastructure is inadequate for the new paradigm.

PK,

Given that Northern power station and half Pelican point closed in 2016, the AEMO's 2015 assessment is certainly redundant.

The reason that Pelican point could not fire up the second part of its generation was because, having mothballed it, its contract only permitted enough gas supply for one unit, and would have been in violation of its contract, and was according to AEM rules not allowed to operate the second generator. Difficult to renegotiate in a few hours.

It now looks like Victoria will soon be facing the same problem.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/energy/power-shortages-loom-following-capacity-shutdowns-20150812-gixitd.html

SM, it seems to me that the political world does not understand what is going on.
If, it is insisted that we must have full solar and wind capability
then we MUST build two energy systems !
One, solar and wind capable of supplying everyone with power.
Two, a coal, gas, & nuclear capable of supplying everyone with power.
If the sun sets and the wind does not blow we use the 2nd choice.
Such a setup will cost close to double the cost of one of them.
How do we get them and the public to understand this ?

However then, can we afford to do that ? Is the finance available ?

New buzz words are "energy security" nonsense words on the basis of some State energy systems have been privatised. "Energy security" had been sold out in the past through privatisation, we are now paying the price

No Ant your logic is wrong.
Privately owned can be reliable, however when you privatise you
cannot change the rules later.
Those that bought the large generators then found that solar and wind
MUST be used if available. That means the large generators were only
able to pick up a full load when the sun set or the wind did not blow.
The result was underutilised plant.
They just could not make money so they switch off and walked away.
Did you expect those companies to subsidise Australia ?

Thanks Bazz, you make my point. Privatisation provides poorer services at greater cost