I doubt anyone is really very surprised given the politics that created it.
it's deffo a political beast, but what isn't in this sphere?
Thanks for the info
@climberman, you've obviously done some homework on the topic.
From that article I got that it's going to cost a lot and it's a bit of all eggs in one basket with sketchy numbers on what can actually be generated. I'm not against spending 20 billion of tax money on suitable storage projects all over the country, so the cost stuff is what it is, but taxpayers need to know what this will do to power prices and CO2 emissions in real terms over time. That's not been made really clear.
I just find it interesting and try to read a bit.
I don't really worry so much about power prices - in terms of AGW high prices are good. In social terms less so. I think that in the current political climate they are a distraction from AGW action and Labnatiral's love of coal and gas donations. Great politics though, it was well framed by whoever thought of it.
The aim of these types of projects is to capture the highest cost areas of the power market - which serves to moderate the higher (and, at a guess, the very lowest as well, by being a demand point for when the NEM is trying to dump power because consumer demand is low and production is high) end of the price market - smoothes things out. Because all the generator companies game this as much as possible ('oh, I own a gas generator - I might take the coal generator offline for service when prices might be high') they will argue againt government market smoothing. Maybe they are right?!
Re CO2 emissions that's also hard but it reduces reliance on CO2-producing generation so will be a part of the puzzle. There's no silver bullet, it's all incremental change in tech, interconnection, market rules, customer responses, etc
Probably that too!
The thing with snowy is I’m not clear on why we need to spend public money on it. The private sector has been rolling out more generation than we need, they will take on (are taking on) the storage/grid services as well - just in a decentralised manner which is arguably better for grid reliability anyway.
Free markets FTW.
We could sell it later!