Rather than aping what others are doing with renewables we should first of all examine why they are migrating to renewables. A country such as Germany has to import its non-renewable energy so naturally it will be miniising its dependance on imports. by morphing to renewables, The Merkel Government is killing two birds with the one stone and is on a political winner by pandering to te Greenies and the economic rationalists at the same time.
We have a different situation. We currently have a mix of coal, gas, hydro & renewables . We have some of the world's cheapest coal & LNG as evidenced by our massive thermo coal & LNG exports. We are also almost 100% dependant on imported petroleum products.
If we can replace our imports of petroleum by a mix of LNG & EVs, then that would make economic sense with a small environmental dividend, IMO.
The renewables lobby always fail to factor-in the royalties collected by state Governments on the production of coal & LNG. A 100% renewables energy regime would have to account for this royalty loss, IMO, which now provides Qld & NSW with about $7 billion a year. For example, Queensland collected almost $4 billion coal royalties in 2019.
To formulate a sensible national energy policy we have to have a long term economic plan. Are we going to remain as we are industrially or are we going to ape the USA by government industrial development support. Trumps 'bring back US jobs" implies massive re-industrialisation which in turn means higher electricity consumption and add automation to the mix, we have even more electricity consumption.
IMO, if we want a sustainable economy independant from both China & the USA , we have to industrialise, diversify trade by adding domestic value to our exports and capitalise on our many FTAs. At present our FTAs are severely impacting the average workers standard of living by forcing workers into low paying service jobs.
