There was a Turnbull era report that suggested they could have energy security AND water security, long term, by building 70 - 120 pumped hydro dams. Pumped Hydro would give them heaps of energy storage, and the dams could be tapped in severe droughts.
We got Snowy 2.0 out of that process, and a few state governments have some fast tracked private pumped hydro dams, but ultimately there isnt enough political spine in the whole country to tackle it.
We cant really scale renewables without storage, and battery storage at scale would probably suck up the worlds supply of lithium. The big battery in SA is great for market arbitration, and smoothing out the frequency, but if it was tapped to supply baseload, would not give you very long. The demand for these batteries would be huge if its left to them.
As it is we will move slowly in kinda the right direction, and probably get very lucky. Thats how Australia works usually, just a country of people gambling constantly on remaining relatively lucky.
> Australia’s NEM will see a massive increase in grid-scale battery energy storage capacity in the next three years. There are 16.8 GW of battery projects that could come online in the National Electricity Market (NEM) by the end of 2027. This would result in a ninefold increase in battery energy storage capacity in just three years - with 2 GW operational today.
Compare to ~22.5GW of total coal generation capacity and ~30GW of utility scale solar in Australia. This does not include behind the meter solar and batteries.
We got Snowy 2.0 out of that process, and a few state governments have some fast tracked private pumped hydro dams, but ultimately there isnt enough political spine in the whole country to tackle it.
We cant really scale renewables without storage, and battery storage at scale would probably suck up the worlds supply of lithium. The big battery in SA is great for market arbitration, and smoothing out the frequency, but if it was tapped to supply baseload, would not give you very long. The demand for these batteries would be huge if its left to them.
As it is we will move slowly in kinda the right direction, and probably get very lucky. Thats how Australia works usually, just a country of people gambling constantly on remaining relatively lucky.