Luciferase,
Firstly, this has very little to do with my religion, which is Christianity. The deplorable neocon tactic of calling what you oppose a religion (to make it seem illogical to atheists and evil to Christians) despite it having no spiritual significance may fool imbeciles like runner, but any intelligent person can see through it and attempting to use it reflects very badly on you.

Secondly, that's an interesting new definition of "agrarian" you have there! Has it made it into any dictionaries yet? When energy cost makes up a high proportion of a company's total cost, it makes sense to me to time operations to take advantage of cheap electricity and avoid having to buy much expensive electricity. Why doesn't that make sense to you?

Thirdly, who cares if the UK would have been in a dire situation without nuclear power? It has nuclear power, will continue to have nuclear power, and IMO should have more nuclear power (especially in southern England).

Fourthly, you seem to regard scalability and viability as digital, though the reality is very different. There's a lot we can do to increase storage (for instance Snowy 2.0) despite there being limits to how much pumped storage we can build. AIUI solar thermal is already feasible and the biggest obstacle to building it is currently the financiers wanting to take too big a cut. Another complication with storage is that its viability depends not only on the cost of storage but also the difference between price peaks and troughs which storage reduces - so I expect SA's battery to be profitable but I wouldn't expect hundreds of them to be profitable at that price.

For AEMO to expect rapidly evolving technology to suddenly stand still would be pretty stupid - if you doubt the ability of the technology to reach expectations, developing a contingency plan is sensible; abandoning the main plan isn't. We shouldn't worry too much about how to get from 80% renewables to 100% when we're less than half way to the former figure and still reliant on coal.

Aidan, I think the thing that is lost in all this is 'relevance'.
You mention the SA battery with apparent fondness.
I on the other hand condemn it.
It is difficult for an outsider (technically versed or not) to get a 'feel for the true viability of renewables because of all the corruption and opportunism surround them.
We cannot separate fact from fiction.
The word relevance is key in all this because if the theories cannot be converted to fact then it is not relevant.
If the cost cannot be brought down to a truly affordable level, nor a politically sanctioned one then it's not relevant.
Something is only relevant when it ticks all the boxes.
Until then it is only a story and nothing more.
Because we need actual three dimensional structures, the stories are not relevant.
Because we need electricity now, renewables are not relevant.
Renewables have become a cliche, a joke.
Even the snowy II you seem to speak so fondly of, please don't.
It is a most absurd idea with totally conflicting cost to performance ratios.
I would suggest that we will get no closer to any form of true affordable energy, any time soon unless we remove these thieves from owning the power generating facilities and return them back into govt control.
This is the real enemy and both sides of govt are implicated in this fraud.

"And of course we don't have to rely exclusively on storage - we can also use demand management (for instance not starting a batch of smelting if calm cloudy conditions are forecast)."

You must have been kidding. Sorry, missed the obtuse humour. Lets smelt (make hay) while the sun shines, eh, ha ha, looking at it like a farmer. Brilliant.

What's not religious about "You're obsessing over a problem that will be solved long before we reach it."? Sounds pretty much like "Build it and they will come", or "He will come again", AKA "blind faith".

There is no reason to expect what you hope for. There is nothing feasible, scalable and viable (all three as they relate to science and economics) about currently available storage options for grid-scale application. There is only hope of new breakthroughs. It's imbecilic to embark on a path towards something that doesn't exist. That's where AEMO and our Chief-Imbecile want to take us.

ALTRAV "I would suggest that we will get no closer to any form of true affordable energy, any time soon unless we remove these thieves from owning the power generating facilities and return them back into govt control."

Government will bury the true cost so you'll never be able to follow the money. It's bad enough already. Unions will be feather-bedded, as they always are wherever they can hold the public to ransom.

I return to this notion of industry shaping its activity to supply. I'm against this notion that we should simply roll with whatever nature dishes out. Man did this before the industrial revolution. Why should we relinquish the control we've gained over nature? Is it some sin in the eyes of renewablistas?

How do we run such a show, with workers hands-in-pockets waiting around to be called upon when the weather-forecast looks promising. We need cheap, reliable energy for a myriad of things, from raising living standards (so lowering population growth in the third world), electrifying transport, desalination, recycling, land and water repair, fertilizer production, synthesizing fuels, etc. We need cheap, reliable energy for the wheels of these industries, and more, to keep turning and maintain steady lives and certainty for citizens.

The triage of demand-side curtailment imposed by following nature's whim is avoidable by AEMO taking us down a more tried and true path. Very sadly AEMO and, I fear, the entire bureaucracy, is so infiltrated by leftist ideology at every level that there is diminishing hope of anything sensible happening.

If anyone should make hay while the sun shines it is the Coalition, if it can first get re-elected, which can get to pushing the nuclear barrow with four years of blue sky ahead of it. I wait, watch and hope.

Many suggesting that the electricity generating system be handed back
to government. I would normally oppose that but due to government
interference in the market the industry has collapsed.
It has collapsed because we cannot repair or refurbish enough capacity
to avoid significant blackouts/high prices before new contracts for
new generators could get through environmental approval, tendering
for contracts, accepting and then building the stations.
That will take years and years so what do we do in the meantime.
Well a few hundred of the diesel sets like Sth Aus's 100 diesels !
Hmmm
Luciferase, I will read those links with interest.
I note one of them is the same author as that link I previously gave
the one about 14,000 x 120 MWhr batteries for the UK.
The real problem with batteries is they have to be recharged.
If they are in a discharge state because of yesterdays wx, then what
if today's wx is the same ? Or the next days wx is also overcast & still.

All remaining power stations must be refurbished as after all there is
no such thing as a clapped out power station.

Frankly it is a nightmare to solve.

Luciferase,
This is not about relinquishing control over nature; it's about recognising that controlling nature is not a prerequisite for exploiting it. Not that we were ever in as much control over it as you might think - even before all those wind turbines and solar panels were connected to the grid, the weather had a large effect on wholesale electricity prices (with demand for heating or air conditioning making them high when it was very cold or very hot). Yet you seem to be ideologically opposed to firms exploiting these price differences!

How it would work in practice would be up to the individual firms to negotiate, but we're sufficiently good at forecasting that it's unlikely to be much of a problem.

Do you have a different definition of "grid-scale" than everyone else? Because pumped storage is generally regarded as grid-scale.

And do you even know what blind faith is? It's belief despite an absence of (or in some cases even a contradiction of) the evidence. It's certainly not blind faith to believe that engineers will find a way to commercialise processes that scientists are already aware of - it's what many are paid to do, and there's a long track record of engineers having done so. And going by past performance it's also far more likely than not that there will be scientific breakthroughs that we will be able to take advantage of.