So you're saying the following flaws in the report are already...

So you're saying the following flaws in the report are already debunked?

CIS published these on Friday (3 days ago - 3rd May) linked here.

The six fundamental flaws of GenCost and the ISP are:

1 – Out-scoping costs

• GenCost excludes storage and transmission costs incurred before 2030, making wind and solar appear cheaper than coal, gas and nuclear, even with high wind and solar penetration;
• The ISP relies on rooftop solar and home batteries to provide generation and storage but excludes their costs from the model;
• The ISP excludes the cost of recycling wind turbines, solar panels and batteries, making renewables appear cheaper than they are over their lifetime.

2 – Out-scoping carbon

• The ISP excludes emissions from the manufacture of wind, solar and batteries making them seem cleaner. This restriction of ‘Scope 1’ emissions means the ISP will increasingly export emissions to China, whilst creating the appearance of meeting net zero ambitions locally.

3 – ‘Match-fixing’ the energy transition

• The ISP claims a renewables-dominated grid is the cheapest option for Australia’s energy system without comparing any alternative, effectively fixing the outcome from the beginning, as the only baseline scenario without a binding renewable energy or carbon target has been removed;
• The ISP manipulated the selection of inputs to force a faster timeline for transmission projects.

4 – Overfitting the model

• The ISP has an overfit model that assumes favourable weather decades in advance and builds flexible gas capacity to compensate for years predicted to have poor weather for renewables. In reality, the grid will have to be prepared for almost any weather, every year, requiring greater investment to ensure reliability.

5 – Disintegrating the integrated system

• The ISP method for determining the value of individual projects does not treat the energy system as an integrated whole (i.e. a system of smaller sub-systems) but rather a collection of parts largely independent of one another, allowing uneconomic projects to be approved and costs passed onto consumers;
• The ISP treats government-committed projects with costs yet to be finalised as determined and does not assess their benefits making transmission projects that link these assets seem more valuable.

6 – Cherry-picking data

• GenCost cherry-picks a single, overestimated data point from a cancelled project to use as the cost estimate for Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and does not include any data from large-scale, nuclear plants — making nuclear energy seem more expensive;
• GenCost cherry-picks coal and gas price estimates so that fuel price spikes induced by the Ukraine war are locked in for the lifetime of new coal and gas plants;
• GenCost uses unrealistic assumptions about construction costs for new coal plants, reinforcing the illusion they are more expensive than renewables;
• The ISP chooses certain future years in which transmission projects show greater cost benefits, then justifies projects going ahead as soon as possible in an entirely different year;
• The ISP selects years in its reliability analysis in which no reliability breaches occur and ignores years when a breach is likely to occur.

Some pretty damning items in that list for CSIRO.

But back in the real world - it's been an observable fact that wherever renewables have been introduced across the world, country by country, that electricity prices have sky-rocketed. Plus nations like Germany have also started to de-industrialise due to the cost of power increasing, just like we're starting to by losing aluminium smelters and plastics producers due to unreliable power or higher gas prices. If renewables are 'cheapest' - then why aren't we benefitting from that price advantage? Because they don't take into consideration all the other costs like the impact of grid unreliability or what about hail storms taking out whole fields of panels like in Texas.

CSIRO asks who am I going to believe - them, or my lying eyes as I look at my electricity bill.

Oh - and I wonder if they priced hydro power like they did SMR's and used Snowy Hydro as the example - original estimate $2 billion - more recent estimate - $12 billiion. Not sounding cheap to me, nor the rest of Australia who've been taking on a merry ride and now need to pay the merry men.