Where to now for long term investors of Telstra, page-12240

No the renewables are excellent and very viable BUT they MUST be supported by "firming" and there MUST be "inertia" in the grid to provide frequency stability. "firming" can come from batteries but to support the network you need to provide power from batteries that will see you through a wind drought which can easily be up to 3 days - that's an awful lot of batteries that need replacement every 10 years. A better solution (with batteries) is pumped hydro - problem here is that you need the water and the elevation. For example in WA they simply do not have wither the water or the elevation. Things look better on the east coast (with Snowy hydro and Tasmania) but there are also problems her - Snowy hydro is not going to be around until 2025 (optimistically) and well over budget at $5.1 Bn. It also a one shot possibility - its got up to a weeks storage when absolutely full - this is extremely unlikely so possibly 3 days is more typical. Once the water is shot it needs months to build up again (hopefully not another drought - wind or water). Also the Murray river needs water to sustain wild life (i.e you cant't keep pumping it up hill during renewable excesses and let it down - the river needs to flow. Pumped hydro does however provide "inertia" for frequency control (batteries don't), The other problem is that existing pumped hydro was designed to pump water uphill at night (from coal fired power) over about 12 hours - there's insufficient pumping capacity to pump the water up hill between 11.00 am and 2.00 pm when there's excess solar - so existing pumping capacity will need to be increased by about a factor of four.

Other problem (as i said in the previous post) is frequency control which needs inertia to sustain 50c/s - batteries and renewables do not provide this they are all DC sources with inverters to convert to A?C (50c/s) - batteries help click in at the few seconds mark but useless for sub second (which is the problems). Other countries use a device called a "synchronous condenser" which is effectively an electric motor, flywheel (to provide inertia) and a generator - more expense.

The best solution ayt the end of the day is nuclear energy but Bowen won't have that. Another solution in fossil fuels with carbon capture - but that's very expensive and still uses fossil fuels - I'm for nuclear for firming and also is most of the rest of the world apart from Germany, Austria (look at their energy prices) and Australia. Germany is the poster boy for what not to do