A few weeks back, I had engineer Ben Beattie on the podcast to explain some of the unappreciated costs of transitioning to a renewable electricity grid.

Before this, Aidan Morrison had explained how many of the costs required to deal with variation in when and where energy is produced from wind and solar were excluded from the (in)famous GenCost report from the CSIRO.

Today, Professor Mark Diesendorf, who has studied the electricity grid and energy markets for many decades, provides the counterargument to these claims and makes the case that renewables will be cheaper in the coming decade.

A couple of insightful points I took away were:

* “Baseload” generation still requires some backup for breakdowns and maintenance

* Sometimes expensive electricity in countries with a lot of renewables is just measuring the expense of the country overall (my interpretation of his point).

We tried to get to the heart of where disagreements exist, and where they don’t, rather than talk past each other. I hope we achieved that.

Find Mark’s writings at https://www.markdiesendorf.com and his latest book, The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation: Technological, Socioeconomic and Political Change, here.

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