Barnaby Joyce's costly gamble on coal, page-27

Poor old Barnaby.

Isn't Barnaby supposed to be some kind of accountant ?

It seems he hasn't done his numbers on this one.

Apart from not needing a coal fired power station in Qld, Barnaby is now promoting a white elephant. Literally.

Normal large baseload power stations cannot compete in a renewable energy market. Baseload power stations rely on running at near full capacity 85-95% of the time. And, they have to do that for 30-40 years for their business model to work. That's what they base their LCOE on.

In a market where intermittent renewable energy exists and provides large amounts of very cheap electricity, such as during the day from solar, a baseload power station simply cannot compete on price. So, in that case, the baseload power station can no longer run at high outputs for long periods. Large baseload power stations aren't designed to change output quickly and frequently. That's why we have peaker stations instead.

Therefore, large baseload power stations online time is falling from 85-95% to well below 50% in some cases. This takes them from a profit to a big loss.

The more renewables that are built, the worse it is going to get. Once more energy storage gets built, the output periods from renewables will effectively become longer further trashing the LCOE of baseload.

Tony Seba sums it up here.