STO Well positioned, page-574

Further examples (amplifying the recent "seminal" Fed. ALP's, & Fed. Resources Minister M. King's, official Announcements) of the crucial role of gas in Australia "to 2050, and beyond".

For reliable, cheap, baseload power, gas will be esential in Australia, & probably the vast majority of countries in the world, for at least another 30+ years- renewable energy suffers from the problem of "intermittancy"- & current battery technology is unable to provide a panacea.

(Many experts also state thermal coal power will also be crucial, world-wide, for many decades- although its share of power in the grid will, probably, slowly decline).

abc.net.au D. Mercer said 26.5.24

"The head of one of Australia's biggest power retailers has warned that Australia's energy transition is veering out of control, pointing to a major market disruption that hit New South Wales as evidence of the turmoil.

During a week in which NSW agreed to extend the life of the state's biggest coal plant, Alinta boss Jeff Dimery cited dramatic events in the market earlier in the month to argue the system was in distress...

Among the blows were a number of planned and unplanned outages at coal plants in NSW...
Paul McArdle from market analysis firm Global Roam said the coal outages coincided with relatively calm conditions which meant output from wind farms was lower than normal....

"It was a bit of a strange one," Mr McArdle said. "It was not demand related – that's the first point.

"In fact, demand was boringly normal, I'd say.

"But questions about why it happened and what it means for the future are two separate questions."

Mr Dimery, speaking at an oil and gas industry conference in Perth this week, said the intervention by AEMO was a portent of the disruptions to come if Australia failed to properly handle the switch away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy...

Mr Dimery said adding in ever more intermittent renewable energy without the capacity to back it up for days at a time was fraught. While batteries were extremely well suited to tasks lasting up to about four hours, he said other options were desperately needed for longer-duration requirements.

He argued those options often boiled down to pumped hydro plants such as Snowy 2.0, which were complex and expensive to build, or gas-fired generators".

https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/markets/warnings-australia-s-energy-transition-out-of-control-as-nsw-market-quietly-melts-down/ar-BB1n2WaH?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=LCTS&cvid=e000586801174f7e80f0941436