The market operator will ensure that cheaper options get priority in supply.
Rhian,
i.e. inferior quality yet still no reduced excessive costs !

In the meantime, while Australia anxiously races to commit economic suicide by giving up our comparative advantage in power, the rest of the world continues to burn the dreaded fossil fuels.

Preliminary estimates show that world-wide emissions are at record levels. Few nations are meeting their reduction promises and the largest emitters plan to continue burning coal/oil. There are over 1600 new coal plants on the books world-wide with most being in China and India. That's NEW plants in addition to those already in place. So while Australia strives to get rid of our coal plants, our efforts are negated many times over by nations who have no intention to buy into the great scare.

So Australia's energy needs and solutions are very complex, debatable and change in aspect over time.

All this requires the studies and links that MAX and now RHIAN are bringing to the table.

NUCLEAR

Old-style NUCLEAR reactor electrical production is increasingly expensive due to planning, building and ongoing national security protection.

Extreme cost is also increasingly evident with Nuclear reactors needing to be Decommissioned after 35-40 years. That means 100s-1000s tonnes of irradiated components needing to be Taken Apart, Shipped, Stored and Reprocessed.

+++++++++++

Alan B.'s MSR THORIUM religion suffers from the need for literally $100s Billions for technical and business-proven development
- followed by all the old style nuclear costs.

Hi Rhian,
the government has a democratic duty to ban new fossil fuel projects. It's what Australians voted for! We rejected the Denier dogma of the outdated NeoLibs, and voted for the science.

"It doesn’t matter how much capacity you have if the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing."

Actually, that's when it matters the MOST! Because it means you had the overbuild capacity to not only run Australia during your quietest, darkest winter days - but you had enough capacity to ALSO pump all that water up hill again.

"Pumped hydro may be the solution but it has its own challenges in terms of environmental impacts, costs and suitable topography (especially here in WA)."

If we're going off your concern with the exact semantics as presented, I 100% agree with you!

But absolutely EVERYTHING about pumped hydro changes if we ad just two words. The magic words? Off-river.

Off-river closed loop Pumped Hydrogen Electrical Storage opens up TRULY VAST new topologies for consideration, up to dozens of kilometres from any nearby river. Got a great site for a big enough pumped hydro dam? Then build it and pump the water in later. Slowly - without damaging the sending river. Cover it in floating solar panels or rubber balls to reduce evaporation. And you'll SAVE water - because water cooling coal thermal plants uses 10 times more than the estimated evaporation from off-river pumped hydro!

Australia has 300 TIMES the appropriate topology we need. Choose your best third of a percent and we're done!

According to these CSIRO published authors, it can all be done with WWS. Wind, Water Solar.

$100 billion and we're done.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/for-100-billion-australia-could-have-a-low-cost-and-reliable-zero-emissions-grid/

Max Greens suggestion that you could get away with an overbuild
of 2 or 3 times is way off the mark.
It is inversely exponentially related to the physical size of the
area covered by the grid.
If the grid is spread over the whole of Australia you might get away
with six times the duplication.
The only way to be certain BEFORE you build it would be to model it
in real time with existing wind and solar farms plus as many weather
stations as you could find good sites for and feed the lot into a
central computer. Grind up the data and see if it ever fails to
provide 100% supply.
The cost would be peanuts compared to making a major blunder.