FOSSIL FUEL, NOT JUST TOO EXPENSIVE BUT TOO UNRELIABLE!:

"Nearly 500 reports of downed overhead wires, services to 163,000 electricity customers affected, and the failure of high voltage transmission infrastructure causing an isolation of South Australia from the National Energy Market." [...]

Rooftop solar is useful in this regard, because it removes demand from the broader grid, and has already proven itself during warm weather in 2021. For households and small businesses, solar can be combined with battery storage to provide power when the grid is down.

But what about larger-scale renewables?

Andrew Blakers, emeritus professor of engineering at the Australian National University, says extreme weather events are a further reason to speed up the shift away from the traditional hub-and-spoke electricity model to protect the whole grid.

"There might be a few solar farms or wind farms that get damaged by freak weather, a cyclone that goes further south than normal, but when you have thousands of wind and solar farms spread over a million square kilometres, connected with tens of thousands of transmission lines, you have a network that is inherently stable, much more stable than the hub and spoke model," he told RenewEconomy.

"It's really hard to knock out ten thousand generating and interconnecting nodes. not to mention five million rooftop solar homes with electric vehicles and home batteries. We will end up with a much more robust energy system."

Already the distributed energy system is proving itself: earlier this month wind and solar eased the pressure on ageing fossil fuel generators as heat waves surged across NSW.

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