Long term coal price., page-2

The levelised cost of renewables on a stand alone basis plus firming is indeed very high, however, the NEM in a way works like a massive storage / battery. The way to look at it is the flexing each power station (thermal) can do throughout the day, which in effect further subsidises renewables.

For example, the marginal cost of solar during the day us $0 whilst the marginal cost of coal is around $50/Mwh, therefore when prices drop, solar wins in the day whilst coal loses and is forced to throttle back output.

So to get the $/ Mwh cost correct you need to make an assumption that you dont need to fully back up wind/solar and maybe get away with around 10- 20% firming capacity- something that Infigen was doing really well (hindsight Iberdrola got it for even cheaper than i though now that coal and gas is at these prices!).

My preferred way to look at coal is the energy content it has which is around 4.79x one bbl of oil - so 1tonne is worth 4.7x equivalent of bbl of oil.

working back the current oil price at $100/bbl , you get a natural price for coal at $480/tonne - ie the current ceiling price...anything less than this (whixh has been the case for ever ) is arbitrage for power producers which depending on supply may change - something we are now seeing in response to russia/ukraine and in general supply constraints...