BCG looking into things & a knowledgeable viewpoint

The Govt. has BCG looking into things? Not sure whether it's widely known?

Meanwhile I tripped over this post (renewbles have a long way to go?) from someone who appears to be science based - a learned persons "lazxter/bleakcity" worth a read:

It is a fair prediction, and if you are that confident and invest in it, you may be in for a very comfortable retirement if it does work.
However, based on all the reading I have done (both for academic and geopolitical reasons), I argue the following points:

• Wind cannot displace coal, not now not in a million years. Wind farms basically are non-operational by design for a significant part of the year, and generate only intermittent and hard to predict power otherwise. I have essentially earned my PhD in forecasting atmospheric conditions, and wind is easily the hardest variable to predict in short-term horizons (minutes, hours). Let alone that good land for wind farms is getting more limited, you cannot build these plants anywhere you want, it has to be flat, devoid of economic activity, close to the grid, environmentally non-disruptive and easily accessible. And we are talking about a lot of land, a typical medium sized wind farm requires about 20-40 sq.km to displace a medium 150MW coal plant.
• Solar & storage, sounds good, doesn't work (for large scale generation). Batteries are still pretty rubbish, and even if we use the most advanced one, it will be financial suicide, as they cost a horse's arse. Maybe in 10-20 years, but I'm still doubtful, you see battery infrastructure by default, adds extra complexity and unreliability to the power system. Solar itself, is extremely inefficient, so you'd need ridiculously high areas in remote landscapes to replace gas generation. Solar works best for small distributed generation or small off-the grid, definitely not as a main energy source; at least not yet. We at UNSW, have held many records for the most efficient cells over the years and my school receives endless millions of $ for research; even so, the efficiency of most cells barely goes above 24% (and these are in lab conditions, with super expensive modifications).
• Hydrogen for steel; this is a field that I am not an expert in, so fair enough, it may be something we see picking up soon. Again, I'd be skeptical about any such revolutionary technologies though, generally they don't work as well in real life as in the lab or in a research paper.

Originally posted by bleakcity: ↑

A felllow physicist! I loved the physics behind energy systems too, hence I went into academia/engineering.
Pretty sad about the politicisation of this field though, and certainly not proud of the stigma some RE extremist carry.

Anyway, the LCOE of wind/solar is in most cases comfortably higher than coal/gas. This is the levelised cost of energy, which takes into account the total generation, capital and operating expenses. Studies that suggest otherwise are cherry picking situations.

In terms of $/MW of installed power, the costs may be comparable, but again that's misleading, as the capacity factors and efficiencies of wind and solar are much lower than coal or nuclear.

There are several ways you can analyse the true long term cost competitiveness, and much of the media is focusing on the ones fitting their narrative. But I can confidently say that without subsidies or artificial fuel price inflation (which is actually the opposite at the moment, coal and oil/gas are super cheap), renewables cannot compete for large scale generation. In a fully free market without any politics or climate or regulations, I would bet that the planet would be running fully in coal and perhaps some local hydro/geothermal for many years to come.

If lazxter/bleakcitym are correct, all the rhetoric against gas will be redundant for sometime yet & I'd expect BCG to come forward with a pro "GAS" development strategy for Aust.!