"..YOU IGNORE STORAGE.."

While I am well aware of storage, such as it is bandied about with gay abandon by anti-nuke greenies like you, Aidan, I do not ignore the preposterous cost of it.

To build enough storage to provide the availability and reliability of thermal baseload, which modern man has every reason to expect now and into the future, is the insane proposition of the renewablista zealots pushing us toward third world status.

Your bluster about emissions has a single word answer, Germany. For all its billions upon billions spent on renewables, and its extension cords to French nuclear and Nordic hydro, it can't meet its targets and is building coal plants!

Your battery may pay for itself, if we ever know its true cost, only through the circumstances the RET throws up. The energy market is so corrupted by this and the the boondoggle of direct and indirect subsidies, state and federal, any twist is possible. However, on behalf of our grandchildren I oppose any notion that Oz should run on sunshine, wind and batteries while the rest of the world whizzes by us economically.

Luciferase,
Another disingenuous answer from you! Storage has been part of our energy mix for many decades, and the cost is far from preposterous.

Matching thermal baselad is a truly IDIOTIC objective, because with thermal baseload you still need storage (or augmentation with other FF generation) to meet demand. We should aim to meet our needs, not to emulate something that doesn't.

Once you understand that baseload doesn't directly correspond to our needs, you may start to comprehend that nuclear power is not the cheap option that many of its proponents make it out to be. Meanwhile the cost of renewables is falling, and has become competitive with nuclear and FF.

To say Germany is unwise to phase out nuclear power is a great understatement. But that doesn't mean that in Australia (where our demand is low relative to available land and we still have a huge supply of great sites for renewables) nuclear power makes economic sense.

And if you think the Australian energy market is corrupted because of the RET, you really don't understand the issue at all. The market was corrupted from the start (long before the RET existed) by the participants having too much market power. It was frequently more lucrative to hold out for a better price than to profitably generate electricity. Now the big battery is reducing the opportunities to manipulate the market.

The entire edifice of 100% renewables is there being enough affordable storage to make electricity dispatchable 24/7/365, i.e. as reliably as our current baseload system delivers.

Arguing in the eddies about this bit of storage or that bit of peaking supporting thermal baseload is the last refuge of an anti-nuke, renewablista scoundrel, such as you are Aidan. Same as the use of hydro stats wherever it suits to add ballast to bald renewablista claims.

Have a good look at why Energiewende is going guts up. It's because the dream of cheap storage has not manifested, not the lack of any political will, as renewablistas would have it, but because it's not here yet. Germany waits for Godot while its emissions and power prices (and taxes on electricity consumers) have risen.

http://thebulletin.org/2016/05/germanys-energiewende-the-intermittency-problem-remains/

http://alethonews.com/2015/05/11/shambles-energy-professor-declares-germany-energiewende-a-failure/

German renewablistas now pressure other Euro nations to go lock-step with them down the road to oblivion, so as to maintain competitive parity.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/26/with-pollution-on-the-rise-will-europe-finally-resist-germanys-dirty-war-on-nuclear-power/