The press conference is currently still live so this was the best short video I could find on the topic.
To begin, I’m absolutely against this proposal, but I want to see a discussion - hopefully a constructive one - between Aussies (comments are always turned off for Australian news on YT) to gauge some idea of how people generally feel about the idea.
Fire off.
Right so what happens when there’s no sun for a week or two
This is explicitly addressed in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan but the tl;dr is that in a national grid with geographically diverse renewable generation and a little more transmission, the chances of there being a weather-related shortfall are exceedingly rare.
For these cases we have pumped hydro being built, and we can still fall back to gas peaking plants for whatever unmet demand is left.
Yes, gas is not carbon free, and it will be expensive to run in these cases, but it won’t run often, it is already built and will allow us to operate at well above 80% renewables until we can built enough long term storage to make it redundant. This meets our international abatement obligations, and more importantly reduces the area under the emissions curve, which is all that really matters tbh.
Just need to be prepared for events like krakatoa erputing that darkened the sky globally for years in the late 1800s