No, Bazz, we should be talking (and listening) about batteries. But rather than baulking at the cost of using them in a way that nobody's seriously suggesting, we should look at what they can do and how we can take advantage of that. We should also be wary of assuming the requirements of other countries to be relevant here. We're a lot sunnier than the UK, and also have much lower population density. Nor do we have the external connections they do. So the economics of our situation is very different to theirs.

The fact that there are power losses from batteries does not amount to a reason to ignore them. It is quite sensible to charge batteries using cheap electricity from wind and solar power when there's a surplus, then sell it to the grid at a higher price when demand is higher.

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SingletonEngineer,
Germany is (unwisely) phasing out its nuclear power, hence the absence of a declining emissions trend. It's not directly relevant to Australia as we've never relied on nuclear power and the economic case for doing so in the future is far from compelling.

Even if the statistics don't yet show a slackening off of fossil fuel consumption, use of solar power is growing so rapidly that they're likely to soon.

The first line in Table 1 of the report cited by Aidan states that Australian national annual CO2 emissions increased by 0.7%.

That is an increase. Aidan has managed to contradict himself in three short sentences.

SingletonEngineer,
Table relates to emissions from all sources, whereas this article, and by default this discussion, relates to electricity generation.. Emissions from electricity generation have fallen - see Table 2.

Why is it that governments of both parties keep kicking the energy can down the road? Into the forseeable future we will be relying on the grid to maintain a stable source of power, but when the present lot of coal fired generators reach the end of their lives, no one seems to have a clue where all the necessary stable base load energy is going to come from. The answer is not solar and wind combined with batteries or any other sort of storage. Neither is gas which is also another source of CO2.

No one seems to realise the immensity of the cost of producing all our power from renewables, let alone the massive amount of storage required. If we don't start building some nuclear power stations very soon, in twenty years time we will be in very serious trouble. We need to get rid of all the bankers, solicitors, accountants and unionists from the parliament and replace them with engineers who understand the problems. End of story.

David

After nearly 20 years of the RET and billions of dollars on power bills we have increased emissions. Apologists will blame other factors but if I recall the power sector emitted about 200 Mt back then now it's about 190 Mt. Whoopee schweppes. The ACCC have quantified direct RET costs like LGC subsidies and feed in tariffs. They left out frequency correction, the extra fuel needed for fast response gas and diesel and new transmission.

If I recall we barely had problems in the 'bad old days' of dominant coal baseload. Replace it with nuclear to cut emissions. I wonder if the Finkel recommendations cover #4 in the article in that all generators must have some firm capacity. That is to say intermittent generators subsidised or not can't cut into reliable generation when it suits as they have to pay a price themselves.

Aiden what I was talking about was the use of batteries as despatchable
backup. Yes some people are suggesting them as just that !
Of course they have a use for smoothing, just like a capacitor
in a power supply and for frequency adjustment.
My comments about internal losses was because some people think that
any loss means they are unusable.
They think that 0% loss is the normal.
The same applies to the governments Snowy 2.0.
Of course it will not provide as much power coming down as going up.
Some people simply do not understand these realities.
It is that ignorance that has got us into this long term muddle.