So much for " Cheap Green " SA Power, page-37

You are dead right . The best evidence is reality and the great thing is that it is right there in front of us to study . We don't have to guess . We are already building the models for renewable generation based on real data . On top of that , we can introduce it progressively and tweak it as we go in order to build the right type of generation infrastructure .

Not sure why you keep banging on about additional capital cost ? The current generation fleet is old . It all needs to be replaced in the next 10 - 20 years . Some actually sooner than that . So , large amounts of new investment is required regardless .

As to investment in things like Snowy 2.0 or the big battery in Tasmania . Those assets are likely to be used for more than a century and will compliment any type of electricity generation . A pretty good investment I would say .

Gas peakers . Solar plus battery storage is already displacing gas peakers on cost on today's prices . Gas peakers only run for a few hours at a time over a year . A couple of days at best . In the US they operate less than 6% of the time . They represent 30% of the total generating fleet .
Talk about a large investment for a small return , albeit necessary when they are needed .
Solar peakers can and are used every day and their batteries can be used for grid stabilisation . That means that they can do more of the work and reduce the need for larger power stations that are under utilised .
A way more efficient use of the money .

Back to the UK wind drought . Australia is vastly different to the UK . Australia has one of the greatest solar resources in the world compared to the UK . Even Australia's domestic solar output is massive compared to the UK let alone it's commercial solar output . That said . solar has hardly got started in Australia . As solar continues to get cheaper and cheaper it makes even more sense to put more of it in . Solar and wind plus storage is now competing on price with fossil globally and it's price trajectory is still going down . It is likely that in a decade it will be less than half the price of fossil with much lower running costs , no emissions and no legacy issues .
So the argument that it is going to add cost is false .

In the case of a wind drought which will happen regularly , Australia will differ from the UK in two ways . We will have a massive solar resource that the UK doesn't and won't ever have . So while the wind isn't blowing , the sun is still shining . And there will be storage facilities of all different shapes and sizes , custom designed for specific roles , everywhere .

Then there's the physical size of Australia .

The UK is about the size of Victoria and relies on the wind that is adjacent to it . That leaves plenty of other areas in Australia that won't necessarily be becalmed at the same time , unlike the UK . Large windfarms are being built up the Eastern Seaboard that feed into the national grid . Wind generation that will mostly have storage on site as a package .
Thanks to data that has been collected over decades we can model these wind events and design the infrastructure specifically to match it .
And we have the luxury of doing this while the fossil fleet is still available to us .

Coal , gas and nuclear cheaper ? I call bs on that one . Old coal power stations become very expensive to run , aren't flexible and breakdown more often . When they need maintenance they take big lumps of supply off , sometimes for months . So they need more fossil fuel stations to cover them for those periods . A large , distributed renewable system is likely to be more reliable , more efficient and way more flexible . Thanks to the modelling from the data we already have , it is not complicated at all . Certainly no more complicated than the system we have now which is subject to manipulation by the power companies .

Storage . Australians are pretty good at accepting new technology . They have been putting solar panels on their houses for years and the domestic battery market is ramping up the same . As this continues we are developing a very large distributed storage facility that is funded by the consumer . Because people want to, not because they have to .
EV's . As the sales of evs increase over time we also develop yet another distributed storage facility that is once again funded by the consumer . Evs are predicted to match ICE cars in price between 2021 and 2025 and considering that we buy 1 million cars a year , that is a giant stationary storage component that will build quickly . That part of our infrastructure will essentialy be free as it comes with the cost of the car .

Once again debunking the increased cost theory that gets bandied around .

There are no countries that run off new renewables and storage yet . That is another dumb question .
However , there are many example of countries and states that are increasing the use of renewables over time . The benefit of this is that these renewables are being integrated progressively , without disruption , and are providing valuable data in how they can be made to fit in with weather patterns , load changes etc .

If you'd bother to watch any of the videos I've posted you would have seen this in action .

I encourage you to do some reading on this subject in order to educate yourself better . There is plenty of info available and the changes are literally happening already .

And before you mention cost , have a look at the cost of power in Texas . In Texas the wind generating capacity is passing that of coal and yet the still have very cheap power . So much for renewables being expensive .