To John Daysh
So please show me the plan for Australia's future electricity generation and distribution network.
And it's the lack of a plan (or at least the lack of any publicly available plan) that is irresponsible, not the particular set of policy choices because I haven't seen any such policy choices and hence don't know if they're irresponsible or not.

There *is* a plan, Bernie. It's the one produced by the statutory market operator.

The national planning framework for generation, transmission, reliability standards and future system development is the Integrated System Plan, produced by AEMO. It sets out the scenarios, the projected mix, the required transmission build-out, the reliability settings and the system pathways.

It's publicly available and updated regularly.

That is the document governments use to assess system development. It is also where total system costs are modelled under different assumptions. GenCost is an input-cost report, the ISP is the system plan.

The absence of a single headline number doesn't mean the absence of a plan. It means the plan contains multiple scenarios with different trade-offs, because system cost is not a one-number question.

If you believe the ISP is inadequate or incorrect, that's a separate argument. But saying there is "no plan" when the national system plan is published, updated and widely cited simply doesn't reflect the reality of how energy planning is done in Australia.

To John Daysh:
"There *is* a plan, Bernie. It's the one produced by the statutory market operator. The national planning framework for generation, transmission, reliability standards and future system development is the Integrated System Plan, produced by AEMO. It sets out the scenarios, the projected mix, the required transmission build-out, the reliability settings and the system pathways."
So what is the cost of the plan, please, based presumably on what is considered to be the most reliable and cost effective scenario?

Bernie,

Again, there is no single cost of "the plan" because the Integrated System Plan does not nominate a single preferred system with a single reliability standard, technology mix and time horizon. It explicitly models multiple scenarios, each with its own total system cost, trade-offs and risks.

Asking for the cost "based on the most reliable and cost-effective scenario" assumes agreement on what level of reliability is required, what risks are acceptable, and over what timeframe costs should be assessed. Those choices are not technical outputs of the ISP, they are policy decisions that governments must make. Until they are fixed, there is no single number to quote.

The ISP does publish total system cost ranges for its scenarios. What it does not do, and cannot honestly do, is collapse them into one authoritative headline figure and present it as "the cost of Net Zero". That would require locking in assumptions that governments have deliberately kept open.

If your argument is that governments should explicitly choose one scenario, own its assumptions, and accept the political consequences of that choice, that's a political argument. But the absence of a single number is not evidence that there is no plan or that costs are being hidden.

To John Daysh
So there is a plan and there is an estimated costing. Why have you tried to deny for so long that a plan, regardless of its various shortcomings and uncertainties that you have referred to, did not exist?
AI says the cost of this plan is some $122 billion but it also says: "The $122 billion estimate covers utility-scale generation, storage, and transmission, but excludes consumer energy resources (like rooftop solar), distribution upgrades, and already committed projects." Some 4.2 million households have solar panels on their roof, costing roughly $21 billion. What does the plan say about expanding this number? My guesstimate is a doubling at least but with most of these houses also having batteries to feed back into the grid when needed, so another 4 million homes with $15,000 solar panels and batteries will add another $60 billion to the cost.
When you ask Google "how much money has been spent to date by governments around Australia on renewable energy projects?", the answer comes in at about $200 billion when you add up what's been spent to date. So the total is now approaching $400 billion. Do you not see why people like me are so concerned, when much of this expenditure will have to be spent again as solar panels and batteries need replacing every 10 to 20 years. No wonder electricity prices are going through the rood - Nero (Bowen) playing the violin while Rome (Australia) burns!

I haven't denied the existence of a plan at any point, Bernie.

In fact, I've repeatedly said the opposite: that Australia's system planning is done through AEMO's Integrated System Plan, and that GenCost feeds into it as an input-cost study. What I've pushed back on is the claim that there is no plan because there isn't a single headline number labelled "the cost of Net Zero".

Those are not the same thing.

The figures you're now assembling illustrate exactly why collapsing everything into one number is misleading. You're mixing ISP system-cost estimates, private household investment decisions, historical expenditure, replacement cycles, and speculative future uptake into a single running total, as if they were all the same category of cost borne by government.

They aren't.

Rooftop solar and household batteries are voluntary private investments made for private benefit, not line items in a government-built system. Counting them alongside transmission and utility-scale generation as if they were the same thing is a category error.

Likewise, adding past spending to future system scenarios doesn't tell you "the cost of the plan", it just accumulates unrelated expenditures across different policy regimes, time horizons and asset lives. By that logic, you'd have to add the replacement cost of every coal plant, gas turbine and transmission asset ever built as well.

None of this is an argument that costs are trivial or that electricity prices aren't a serious issue. It's an argument that meaningful discussion requires consistent boundaries. When you mix public and private spending, historical and future costs, and utility and consumer assets into one pot, the number will always look alarming, but it won't describe any real system anyone is proposing to build.

If the concern is affordability and governance, the productive way forward is to compare like with like: defined scenarios, defined assumptions, and defined scopes. Chaining together guesstimates across incompatible categories only creates heat, not clarity.