There's a place for wind for sure, but I wouldn't call it reliable, especially when compared to geothermal or hydro. Even solar is generally more predictable and reliable.
It doesn't matter what the source of the energy if you store in batteries. This is the game changer for solar and wind that the current government seem to have (wilfully) missed
Like everything it comes down to where is the best place to spend limited money, in the end it's always going to be a combination of supply and storage. Government subsidies for household batteries would be money well spent too.
Personally I would have liked onslow to have been given more thought.
I think Onslow was a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
Deployment of grid scale batteries and incentives for residential solar and batteries which could all be used in VPPs to give resilience to the grid (very important in disasters)
Hub and spoke transmission builds in huge risk as we saw last week
It's true, but when our generation is so dominated by hydro we need a better dry year solution than batteries are capable of providing.
I'm not sure too many people are aware of the state of shit we are in right now with major gas supply issues and low lake levels.
Even more reason to reduce the reliance on hydro and massively increase solar, wind and tidal (we are in a great spot for that too)
Solar and wind were always left behind because of the "unreliable" tag, that's not the case anymore when you can store the energy
I think pumped hydro for storage is cheaper than batteries where that is applicable. ArcActive in Christchurch working on cheaper enhanced lead acid batteries. Next gen.
We're already at 80-90% renewable so it's not a full transition, our major issues is a lack of storage in our largest hydro lakes so if we have a dry year it makes a massive issue. We had a proposed pumped hydro scheme under study but the new government killed it off because they love oil and gas.
