To John Daysh
I think you are being deliberately obtuse and misleading. Nowhere in my comments listing all the costs of our new electricity system in Australia did I say that the costs were to be borne by the taxpayer. I simply gave a summary of ALL the costs, private and public. Since you're not denying the magnitude of the cost total that I provided - about $400 billion - I'll accept that it's in the correct ballpark.

Bernie,

I'm explicitly NOT accepting that figure, and I've said why. Declining to endorse a number built by aggregating incompatible categories isn't conceding it's "in the right ballpark", it's refusing to validate a meaningless total.

What you've done is add together private household investments, public infrastructure, historical spending, future projections, asset replacements, and speculative uptake assumptions across different time horizons, then present the sum as if it described a single system cost. It doesn't. It describes an accounting collage.

Whether those costs are borne privately or publicly isn't the core issue. The issue is scope and consistency. Once you mix voluntary household purchases, government network investment, sunk costs, and hypothetical future replacements into one running total, the result will always look large, but it won't correspond to any plan anyone is proposing or any system that's being modelled.

I'm not being obtuse. I'm insisting on basic accounting discipline. If you want to discuss affordability seriously, the only defensible way to do it is to compare like with like: a defined system, over a defined period, under defined assumptions. Anything else produces a big number, not an answer.

To John Daysh
But you've previously told me that "a defined system, over a defined period, under defined assumptions" doesn't exist and hence can't be costed. I'll stick with my trillion dollar cost estimate until someone comes up with the details of your "defined system, over a defined period, under defined assumptions".

No, I haven't, Bernie.

//But you've previously told me that "a defined system, over a defined period, under defined assumptions" doesn't exist and hence can't be costed.//

What I *have* said, consistently, is that there is no single, pre-political, immutable system with a single cost that exists independently of assumptions. Defined systems do exist, and they are costed, but plural, not singular. That's exactly what the ISP contains: multiple defined systems, over defined periods, under defined assumptions, each with its own cost and trade-offs.

Saying "there is no single ultimate final cost" is not the same thing as saying "there is no defined system" or "no costing". You've repeatedly collapsed those into the same claim, despite being corrected.

If you choose to "stick with" a trillion-dollar figure until a single magic number appears, that's your prerogative. But that figure isn't derived from any defined system, assumptions, timeframe or model. It's a placeholder for dissatisfaction, not a cost estimate.

At this point the disagreement isn't about whether plans or costings exist. It's about whether you're willing to accept that serious infrastructure planning produces ranges across scenarios, not one number to end the argument.

Serious planning produces a plan, surely. There may have to be some preliminaries, but before the work starts there needs to be a plan, a management structure and a budget. A scenario is not a plan. And the envisaging of possible scenarios is an exercise in ..... envisaging scenarios. I had the same argument when the first AEMO Integrated System Plan was published. And the same confusion followed. I had the feeling I was on a different planet. And I still cannot see how construction could proceed from the present state of affairs. Of course that may be an unreasonable expectation, given that the whole project seems to depend on setting targets and attracting investors, rather than allocating funds and building a working clean power generation and distribution system that serves the needs of its customers.

TomBie,

This is where I think the confusion keeps arising. You're using "plan" to mean a single, fully specified engineering project with a fixed design, fixed budget, fixed timeline and a management structure ready to pour concrete. That's a reasonable expectation for a specific asset. It's not how national electricity systems are planned.

The Integrated System Plan is not a construction plan, and it was never intended to be. It's a system-level planning framework that answers a different question: given different policy settings, demand trajectories and reliability standards, what kinds of generation, storage and transmission are likely to be needed, and in what broad sequence? That's why it presents scenarios rather than a single blueprint.

Actual construction proceeds downstream of that framework. Individual projects, whether transmission lines, generators or storage, then have conventional project plans, budgets, approvals and management structures. Those don't appear at the ISP level because they can't, until governments, regulators and markets make specific choices.

In other words, scenarios aren't a failure to plan, they're the necessary precursor to committing capital in a system where demand, technology costs and policy settings are still moving. Expecting the ISP to look like a turnkey construction plan is like expecting a defence white paper to include the build schedule for every future ship and aircraft before cabinet has made the decisions.

You're right in that this approach is very different from a centrally funded, centrally built program. But that's a political choice about market structure, not evidence that planning is absent or incoherent.