I think you should take the time to review past annual reports...

I think you should take the time to review past annual reports for all the major energy suppliers - this infrastructure you are referring to was built in the 1960s-1970s and is very costly to maintain (you will notice as wholesale prices drop, these companies tend to 'sweat the assets', which leads to more outages.

The Ukraine war combined with outages had a major effect on wholesale prices but was a blessing as it allowed these companies to fund major maintenance shutdowns (thus improving availability). Whilst there are things around the edges they can do (and have been doing) to improve the flexibility of the plants (being able to ramp down generating units), the reality is, renewables are eating their lunch (literally, lunch time is the worst for baseload operators).

Some argue there is a case for gas peaking (e.g. Dr Kerry Schott), renewables are here to stay and the only way we can keep baseload financially viable is through a non-market based model of funding (i.e. subsidies or the price floor models negotiated with states) - which begs the question, if we want to provide subsidies here, where else in society is it okay to provide subsidies?

Another question I have, if you were steering the AGL/Origin ships, would you genuinely invest in building a new coal/gas asset (which could last 40 years) when you know that a battery could take all that negatively priced day time energy (not influenced by international trade) and deploy it in seconds, when your gas peaking plant takes 15min to fire up and you have serious concerns about future supply?