Labor backs coal beyond 2050, page-153

For sure things like pumped hydro and gas peakers will play an important role. This transition is going to take decades so there is a need for the older technologies to help us get there.

However, as the grid batteries are demonstrating, they are much better at grid smoothing than any of those other technologies will ever be.

And, as I have shown, there will be such a mass of battery storage by default ( eventually ) that it would be silly not to utilise it. Why would you build pumped hydro projects if you don't need to ?

My point was that people need to understand that the future grid will be fundamentally different . Therefore we will be using infrastructure in ways they haven't though of. E.g. parked vehicles as a firming system. A system that is growing by the day.

Even though ev penetration is tiny in Australia, it is worth looking at the numbers .

60000 hybrid cars were sold here last year. That suggests that customers will buy an alternative to pure ice vehicles provided they are affordable and practical. If those hybrids had been evs then it means that we would have almost a Loy Yang sized power station driving around already ! Even at this incredibly early stage of development !

" There were just 1,769 electric vehicles sold in 2020, just 246 more than in 2019, in contrast with more than 650,000 petrol vehicles sold in 2020.This is despite exciting new electric model releases such as the Hyundai Kona and MG ZS, the most affordable electric SUV in Australia.In contrast, hybrid models sold more than 60,000 units in 2020, an uptick of 93.7%, while plug-in hybrids sold 1,685 units - an uptick of 18.2%. "

https://www.savings.com.au/car-loans/australian-electric-vehicle-sales-run-out-of-puff-lag-behind-other-nations

The way we are going, we will have quite a bit of under utilised energy storage parked around the nation before we even realise it.