WtF? You put total faith in CSIRO/AEMO and don't want to look anywhere else, quite a blinkered approach. Predicting future energy requirements is relatively straightforward, predictions of generating costs more complex. There is no vested interest in predicting future requirements but there is in generating costs. I referred to the AEMO report in relation to future requirements, nothing else, because increasing demand is obvious. I am not tied to that report which you keep banging on about. This is becoming a fruitless debate and should end.

I accept the author's claim that stand-alone renewables have reliability concerns and are not a source of cheap electricity, from basic considerations, unless new information comes to light. The CSIRO/AEMO results may be 'tainted' by political pressure as alleged in the "Big Lie' article in the Daily Telegraph 2 October 2023, which you could read.

Watching videos of so-called Green Energy fails is horrific. Horrific in the sense that even when faced by the reality of these fails some people still refuse to admit how big a failure & how costly in every which way present Green Energy is. I'm pretty sure that there will be better energy available in the future but if we keep using this 'Green energy", we most definitely won't have a future. Just watch electric cars & battery storage etc go up in flames & then imagine the thousands of unsold electric vehicles parked in fields catching fire !
The pollution from Green Energy as it is now is many times worse than using petrol or Diesel.
On top of it all think of the mining processes for Green Energy !

WTF?

Chuckles I said from the start the author had provided us with a rudimentary article.

He states: “ Any pronouncement about renewables being a cheap source of energy is invalid if based on LCOE, no matter what prestigious body pronounces it.”

We now know the CSIRO position and the AEMO position. By the author’s logic the CSIRO and AEMO positions must be valid.

What does AEMO say? They set the market not CSIRO.

"Renewables push NEM electricity prices down to historical levels."

At time of writing the current advertised spot price of electricity in QLD is $18.84 per Mwh.

If the prices overall are “down to historical levels” and the energy retailers were not getting those stated prices it would be shouted from the rooftops.

The terms “cheap” and “affordable” mean different things to different people so a term such as “….. electricity prices down to historical levels” carries much more significance.

If electricity prices are down for retailers while at the same time domestic and business prices are going up then this is an area that probably warrants more attention – this would make a good newspaper article that is in the public interest.

In some parts of Australia there is a sole energy retailer (at one time it was state run) which of course is a monopoly with all the associated problems for consumers.

CSIRO and AEMO draw their information from many sources – not blinkered at all.

A blinkered approach would be relying upon a debunked OLO article and a solitary newspaper article.

A quote from The Economist (Why is Renewable Energy so Expensive?):
"Countries with large amounts of renewable generation, such as Denmark and Germany, face the highest prices in the rich world". And even today that still applies. Real world experience demonstrates that (utility-scale) renewables are expensive, rubbishing the enthusiastic numbers from CSIRO/AEMO. There is no wriggle room here either. Deniers of renewables being expensive, either ignore real world experience, try to discredit it, think it does not apply to Australia (?) or are unaware of it. We need to get real about energy provision.

WTF? wanted to limit this to details of the CostGen report. OK.
GenCost uses a whole bunch of assumptions that are favorable to wind and solar to claim they will be the cheapest… in 2030. GenCost doesn’t even include the cost of transmission, one of the largest expenses for wind and solar. Huge transmission costs are the reason wind and solar projects are sitting stranded in the outback connected to nothing. This is the same CSIRO that seemingly knows nothing about Snowy 2.0, which has blown out from $2 billion to $12 billion for the project and associated infrastructure.
Experience has shown, as in this case, that the projections of quasi government bodies are not worth the paper they are written on.
Australia, you are being conned and by the time you realize it, the people who have caused such damage to the taxpayer will be gone.