If people want to spend their own money on renewables I'm fine with that, but I'm not happy for "renewable activists" to spend my tax money or contrive to force me to follow legislation that I don't agree with, in the name of the ostensive greater good. It appears that 100 Billion dollars (the whole Australian economy is worth of the order of 2,000 Billion dollars) has been spent pushing renewables since 2014 and power prices keep going up. I'd hope that our Aussie Battler's will still be able to recognise their self interest in the face of hype and distractions.

I had to laugh when a local business came to one of our groups and said for the low price of $200k you could future proof yourself and become self sufficient on solar. It was amazing how the salesperson gave his pitch with a straight face, and hoped that none of our people would be taken in, sadly many people had questions.

I even knew an electrician that was taken in by the promise of solar as being able to convert their home into a business by exploiting government and grid renewables incentives. I did the numbers and couldn't make it profitable, and found that some of the numbers were based on outdated promises of kWh prices and some irrelevant grandfathered contracts. When I presented my numbers to the electrician they seemed listless but grudgingly agreed. Overall a waste of time and energy.

I know of the occasional person with a lot of technical knowledge and sacrifice that has been able to make the economics of renewables work, sort of. He has retrofitted and replaced standard home appliances (stove, HWS, freezer, etc) for DC, and build his own battery packs with sophisticated battery management systems. But their car, a 4WD, uses twice the petrol of mine. Even he runs out of battery capacity at certain times.

These days you can sometimes pick up solar panels, "off the side of the road", but the costs don't stop there

Graham,

You've just restated the exact issue I was highlighting. And in doing so, you've confirmed your misunderstanding.

You say there's "no point arguing" with someone who knows the difference between nameplate capacity and output capacity, yet your own comment continues to treat them as directly comparable, as if it's inherently wasteful to build more nameplate capacity when moving to renewables.

Of course renewables have lower capacity factors. That's precisely why more total GW needs to be built to match the energy output and reliability of dispatchables. It's not a "problem" that renewables don't run 24/7 - it's a known characteristic of the generation type, and the system is designed accordingly with storage, firming, and demand response.

That's why your claim - that Queensland will need 50 GW to do the job of 12 GW - is so misleading. The comparison only holds if you pretend that all GW are equal, which they're not. A well-planned renewables-based grid isn't four systems redundantly doing the same job. It's one integrated system doing the job differently.

//If I wanted to measure output, I'd use actual output.//

Great, but you don't. You instead use nameplate capacity for both technologies while ignoring what percentage of that capacity is usable. That's the heart of the false equivalence.

You're framing a deliberate design necessity - building more variable generation to match firm generation - as if it's a scandal or inefficiency. It's not. It's energy system design 101.