Paul is right in that companies won't touch power generation because
of the mess with the political parties intentions.
They could not trust the parties to have a stable policy and so the
risk would be too great for such large capital investment.
Even the banks are wary of providing such finance because of that
and the cancel culture that now preys on anything that moves.

Ultimately it will come to a disaster with widespread daily blackouts
and widespread unemployment. There will be big money for lift mechanics
to be on call 24 hours to release people from stuck lifts.
Might even get me out of retirement as I worked in that field for a
few years a long time ago.
An alternative would be to put a stackable set of chairs in every lift.
No matter what happens, there will be a few years of blackouts
because no one is listening.
Really, to come down to earth there IS only ONE solution;
NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS.

Aidan,
Thanks for the info, will be interesting if there's more talk on this.

I think I may have exaggerated the price of a 16 Gigawatt/hr battery.
Divide it by 10, so may only cost $16 Billion !
Err wait a minute, the figures I have seen are $1 per watt so then
1x1000000000x16
So easy to misplace some zeros.
Anyway, you can see why there is a campaign to get customers to
install batteries and have them available to supply the grid when needed.
So for every 1 Gwatt coal fired station closed down that is what you
need to replace it when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
And then the next morning if your battery is flat you have to pinch
power from somewhere to recharge it in eight hours.

Pauliar,

The only people that are baffled are the ones that have no concept of power generation and network support. The real experts are the ones that recommended this backup supply.

Considering the $bns cost to the state of SA when the renewables tripped makes the backup very worth it.

This graph of electricity generation and source from Queensland after the Callide power station dropped out 2 days ago shows why you need gas-fired power stations. Nothing else will fill the gap when you lose generation capacity. And the more solar penetrates the system, the more you will see this sort of power drop-out on a regular (24 hour) cycle. Wind does the same, but less predictably.

Federal government doing all the right things here, and state governments are posturing. Without firming capacity "renewables" are not fit for purpose. At the moment the only technology that can provide firming capacity at the scale required is gas. https://twitter.com/GrahamY/status/1397773798133276675/photo/1

"more solar penetrates the system, the more you will see this sort of power drop-out on a regular (24 hour) cycle."

What Graham, more exploding coal fired generators? Interesting theory.