My point is that there is an incremental increase in storage potential which is occurring with minimal government intervention, so ramping this up to incorporate mechanisms that release that potential energy into the grid seems an obvious policy step.
A key issue here is the gap between academic / engineering approaches versus what works in the financial / business world versus what can be achieved politically.
There's plenty of examples of things relating to fossil fuels or hydro that were technically obvious but which didn't work either financially or politically and were thus never built.
In terms of energy storage options, in all honesty I wouldn't dispute that SH2 is a long way down the list of good ones if the criteria is technical and economic. It involves 27km of waterway tunnels, plus 10km of access tunnels, and an operating head of about 620m. The scheme is a "pure" pumped storage operation, it adds no net energy beyond that provided by the existing scheme.
There's an alternative scheme in NSW that involves 2km of tunnels in total and achieves a net head of about 800m. It also comes with 490GWh per annum of net generation, due to natural inflow to the upper storage, in addition to pumped operation.
As an engineer would see it, the second one is the obvious first choice to pursue. It's inherently easier to build and with the much shorter tunnel length involves far lower risk. Bonus that it's net energy positive.
Financially the second one is likely to be very much cheaper, both in total and on a per MW basis, and comes with far lower risk.
Those points aren't new. There's a reason why SH2 was rejected back in the 1960's whilst the other scheme was seen as far more favourable and work was done to fully assess it with a view to future development.
Just one minor detail that might make the alternative monumentally difficult.
It involves building a dam on a river you see. And yep, it's located completely within a World Heritage Area.
Ahh, now there's the problem.
In a rational world an objective scientific assessment would be undertaken to evaluate in detail the impact of the scheme, the impact of alternatives, and make a decision on that basis. Bearing in mind the possibility of varying construction approaches to mitigate identified impacts.
In the political world however the use of the words "dam" and "World Heritage Area" in the same sentence isn't just dynamite, it's more akin to an atomic bomb being detonated. No politician's going anywhere near that one and nor will any energy company want anything to do with the idea.
Now I'm not necessarily arguing to build that scheme, my point's about the political difficulty of rationally considering all the options and making informed decisions. Some things just can't be said, rational discussions just aren't possible in the public political arena.
SH2 needs to be considered in that context. For all its shortcomings, and I agree it's not the ideal scheme, at the time it was proposed it came in the context of no other new large scale firm dispatchable electricity source, other than a few gas turbines, having been proposed and subsequently built in NSW in approximately 35 years. When you've been screaming that something needs to be done, and someone offers to do something and that's the only offer on the table, you're going to take it even if it's a long way short of perfect.
I'll speculate that we'll see very similar issues with getting any sort of distributed storage working properly. What's technically possible and what's achieved in reality will likely end up very different things.
That's already an issue right now with the comparatively simple task of heating water. Electric storage hot water is dead simple technology, absolutely proven beyond all doubt, with plenty of manufacturers. But as someone who does a lot of walking and sees a lot of homes being built or renovated, and who pays attention to what's visible from the street in general, I can tell you that gas is overwhelmingly dominant here in SA and that's despite being the state with the highest portion of wind and solar generated electricity. Walk past a house and if the water heater's visible from the street, which is often the case due to placement at the side, the overwhelming majority, including practically new installations, are gas.
That comes about partly due to the actions of consumers but it's heavily influenced by building regulations strongly skewed toward gas as the preferred choice. Never mind that we had a major curtailment of VRE (wind and/or solar) on 5 of the past 7 days, and at least some curtailment on the other 2 days, that could've been used to heat water with zero use of fossil fuels.
Chart shows large solar farms only. As can be seen, they're being routinely curtailed, virtually shut down, during much of the day as there's simply no use for the output. One reason investors have lost interest in building more of them. Meanwhile gas is burned to heat water - madness yes.
Now we do have some electric controlled load water heating in SA, but it mostly turns on at 11pm local time and thus uses electricity produced from good old natural gas.
That may seem like madness, and it is, but it comes down to the world of rules, regulations and bureaucracy. An engineer or tradesman would just get a list of all the homes with timers needing adjustment on site and send a few people out to do them. That sounds really simple, indeed Tasmania actually did that back in 1994 when a timing change was warranted (and the HEC moved those timers all of 30 minutes - some may see that as pedantic, others see it as optimisation).
Can't do it these days though. Not with the NEM and everything split between several different regulators, then there's the issue of the distributor owning the timers but not being responsible for generation or retail, and so on. Who pays? And who would authorise spending the money? And who would fund the very substantial cost of trying to get authorisation for the money? Cooking the planet is far easier and the path of least resistance.
Trust me, personally I've tried fixing that one. Bureaucracy trumps uncommon sense yes. Nobody disagrees at the technical level but oh wow there's some hurdles. It'll get done only by means of physically replacing all the meters - and that means it's a very long term thing.
Now I can't prove that anything similar is going to go wrong with ideas of using vehicle batteries and so on, but there's plenty of technical people who do hold a lot of concerns there. Concerns that rational technical outcomes will be lost to bureaucracy and ideology in practice. I mean if we can't get it right with the comparably simple task of heating water then that doesn't bode well.