There's really four aspects to the overall dilemma:
1. Need to meet the technical (electrical) requirements. Fail that and the lights really will go out, no question about it.
2. Financial cost both in terms of the actual costs and the price charged to consumers.
3. Use of natural resources. 50Hz AC power does not exist anywhere in nature, it is a completely man-made thing, and in order produce it requires that some source of primary energy be used. Some of the available sources of primary energy are plentiful and with minimal consequences to their use but others are physically limited, or entail broader implications such as importing from unstable or unfriendly sources, and a valid question exists as to whether or not is is sensible to use these resources to generate electricity? That is particularly so in the case of relatively limited non-renewable resources which have important uses for other purposes.
4. Environment. The mainstream environmental movement is often associated with trees and whales but it's a matter of historical fact that in the Australian context the movement had already tackled issues relating to hydro-electric schemes versus the wilderness, pollution and the use of limited resources at gas-fired power stations and the generic concept of building a nuclear power station several years before the movement focused on anything relating to trees.
I frame the problems from different perspectives, noting you tackle them in a fashion.
1. Not enough spare capacity to address present weather extremes simultaneously with plant outages
- this will be exacerbated if responses do not account for future plant closures
2. Investor unwillingness to commit to fund large scale projects without clarity on a price on carbon
- COAG EC opted for a NEG rather than Finkel's blueprint for transition
3. We need to incentivise solutions to intermittency in a transitioning market
- cost curves for FF energy and renewables (VRE) trend opposite such that CST for example, will be cheaper than coal in the early 2030's
4. We need a commitment to fund the spine of a fully interconnected eastern seaboard grid, and upgrade the technical componentry to progressively tie-in VRE
The adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
cannot apply if it ain't there.
Finkel wanted it all to be there because Australia is to big for a one size fits all solution.
The feds want - and it's their policy - that what we already have must be
cheap for consumers as we lead into the next election. But a lot of
what's there is already broke and needs fixing.
Skipping directly to 2 as it solves 1. Investors understand the global market either already has or is putting a price on carbon. Should that occur after an investment decision is made, the commercial viability of a project can disappear. As SP noted earlier, generators don't want to be burnt by stranded assets. That leaves governments to fill any void. However, the States seem unwilling given it defeats the purpose of a NEM, while the Commonwealth quickly splurges up to $5bn on a giant battery that removes electricity from the grid and won't be available for about 6 years.
Point 3 is pivotal. Finkel's approach included utility-scale renewable generation, storage technologies, flexible thermal supply (CST) and distributed energy resources (of which microgrids and bi-directional energy flows from EVs are subsets).
This paper shows that CST will in future become cheaper than coal and could prove a quicker fix to intermittency than Snowy 2.0. It also solves energy problems for more remote regions of Australia.
Point 4 just adds to Smurf's point 1 in that we need additional interconnector infrastructure as well as the concomitant technology to tie-in the many VRE options.
My argument from the outset is that we have
political failure to act. The options are available to get on top of and ahead of out energy dilemmas. COAG EC has received excellent advice and understands what the future holds.
In the meantime we, the consumers, are being screwed over.