Just musing, assuming SA doesn't want to do anything sensible and conventional over the longer term, then:

Rather than batteries, they could add massively more wind and solar generation to produce hydrogen by electrolysis and convert this to ammonia (using nitrogen from the air, i.e. the Haber process) which is easily liquified with a little pressure, giving it good energy density.

The ammonia can be used in internal combustion engines or fuel cells, producing only nitrogen and water. So it could cleanly fuel electrical generation when there is too little light and wind AND transport AND be used in fertilising crops for ethanol production on poor land AND as a refrigerant for itself where required.

http://www.agmrc.org/renewable-energy/renewable-energy/ammonia-as-a-transportation-fuel/

At least ammonia generated electricity is fully dispatchable until the ammonia completely runs out, unlike batteries, which should not be fully discharged (which ruins their life expectancy). Furthermore, battery storage reduces the EROEI of renewables to pointlessness, as well as requiring expensive, regular replacement.

Not for a minute am I saying I've done my sums on this, but if SA is to continue to dream of saving the planet, it should try it without massive, EROEI sapping, battery storage infrastructure.

Luciferase, in what you suggest there are a lot of energy transitions.
Starting at an ERoEI of 10 for the wind generator and then all the
losses in the transitions won't leave much energy at the wheels.

I guess this what I have meant when I said pollies & govt never take
eroei into account.

To defend my brain-fart a little, Bazz, https://phys.org/news/2017-02-flipping-ammonia-production-electricity-consuming.html

Dreaming is fun.

Hasbeen,
Time to grow up yourself - ditch the EROEI meme and start thinking about the real implications!

I'm well aware costs are important. But energy invested only accounts for a small proportion of the total cost. Try actually reading the article you linked to.

SA's skyrocketting electricity costs had very little to do with EROEI and far more to do with the bungled deregulation and privatisation process (which failed to ensure there was an efficient market) and the underinvestment of the 1980s and 90s (AFAIK no power stations were built in SA in those two decades).

SA actually has quite a lot of agriculture. Most of it isn't reliant on the Murray, as our ability to exploit it has been severely limited by upstream irrigators not leaving us much water.

What SA needs is investment. But the RBA sets interest rates at levels appropriate for the eastern states, which are far too high for SA. The amount of Federal funding we get is insufficient to compensate for that.

Worse still, because a lot of Federal funding is in the form of tied grants, infrastructure decisions tend not to be based on what would be the most efficient solution, but instead on how the state can secure the most Federal funding. This problem is NOT unique to SA, but SA is more reliant on Federal funding and therefore the problem is greater here.

As for the sub contract, it was promised before the 2013 election. Since then shipbuilding orders have dried up, meaning ASC's lost a lot of its skilled workforce. Yet another example of the government's focus on short term budgetary figures at the expense of efficiency.

Luciferase,

There's quite a lot of science being done to replace the Haber process with something much more efficient - see http://www.nature.com/articles/srep01145

The sooner we can stop using the Haber process, the better. But meanwhile using hydrogen directly is better than using methane. Ammonia manufacturing does have some potential as a load balancing activity (to take advantage of the excess cheap electricity that a large amount of wind and solar power equipment would sometimes produce).

In the meantime, there is methane already in the ground while hydrogen has to be generated and stored.

As a transport fuel hydrogen isn't a goer unless its volume is greatly reduced, possibly through metal hydrides, e.g. http://www.ergenics.com/hs.html

There are so many approaches we can dream up, but affordable, dispatchable renewable energy 24/7/365 is dream too far.

SA's Plan B, when it went into renewables, is closing in a few days. Unless Hazelwood is paid to stay open, batteries are the only short term solution. It's just a matter of how many and what cost/inconvenience point of compromise SA consumers will bear.