My position is that using today's grid to analyse the risk is not what we should be doing. You need to say what is the wind generation diversity we need and can expect when we build out as much wind as will be required to replace fossil fuels, along with solar etc.
The numbers would look rather different with more wind in Queensland, Northern Territory, further inland. And possibly through a DC link to WA wind and solar. How hard then to not have enough wind? That's a genuine question and one that your government should be looking into.
But it will be a much improved risk situation compared to looking at today's risk.
So I still think that while the ANU report isn't perfect that you can extrapolate from it broadly, and expect wind to do what's needed. Particularly as the solution to any risk is additional storage and solar and because the report is so conservative on solar and battery prices.
You have two paths forward to address those issues in the ANU report - more storage, but at expected future lower costs than ANU assumes. And/or better wind diversity.
And by the time you are really needing that increased storage and improved wind diversity we will be looking at a rather less cloudy crystal ball.
Based on this I can't see how pushing to a 50-70% renewables grids is a problem, backed up up with existing fossil fuel plant.
And by the time you get there the development of solid state batteries and nano-tech solutions to battery limits for power density and cycling capacity will be very different, so storage cost will look very different
ditto solar costs
So debating a fully renewable grid reliability is probably somewhat premature.
What we should be looking at more closely are the steps to a reliable 50% and 75%, renewables grid. And it shouldn't be us, it should be a government supported priority piece of work.
