Storage and transmission costs were included in this study as you could have easily found out yourself by reading down to the fourth sentence of this media release which says:

“The 2021-22 report confirms past years’ findings that wind and solar are the cheapest source of electricity generation and storage in Australia, even when considering additional integration costs arising due to the variable output of renewables, such as energy storage and transmission.”

You seem to presuppose that we would need to build new fossil fuel generating capacity. When in fact it's already installed. And I'm not sure they would always need to burn fossil fuels anyway. Coal fired power plants can burn wood, gas plants hydrogen or methane.

I don't really get the 2 grids thing either. Everything is being plugged into the same grid. Instead of replacing a coal fired power station, you just plug in a wind farm. We already have to maintain peaker plants now.

Yes if you had a grid that was as renewable heavy as we could make it, you would be factoring in the costs of these plants into running the grid. But currently most (all?) Countries aren't at that stage, and if/when it does get to that stage, those peaker plants will still have to compete against other forms of peak energy generation / storage.

I don't think there is enough wood to replace coal, so we'd probably need some new gas turbines. Remember that you need to be prepared for at least a couple of days of roughly zero renewable generation every couple of years. In many locations you have significantly reduced generation every winter. So you need to have sufficient backup capability available. I don't think today's battery tech scales to that amount of storage, so you'll likely have to rely on hydrogen or methane.

There's not enough wood to replace the coal we're using now, no.

But if we are only talking about a fraction of today's usage that is doable.

There's an entire sub chapter and a bunch of tables on current storage technology costs.

Mainly focused on battery banks at scale, and pumped hydro, with a side note or more on hydrogen generation with peak excess for off peak turbines, etc.

Did you read down to the 4th paragraph? It absolutely does.

I'd be curious to know if it also includes a "true" nuclear catastrophe insurance price or (as is more common) if theyre assuming the taxpayer will fund 99.5% of a Fukushima-type $800 billion cleanup bill like in US/Europe.

I read the original report, which still includes figures of >$100 per kWh for storage, projected for multiple decades (if not in this report, in others). For a higher-latitude nation, we need TWh, probably tens of, for even a small nation. Be assured I have crunched these numbers and confirmed against our current best wind+PV resource data.

In other words, if we run a nuclear plant and deliberately induce a, as you say, "Fukushima-style cleaup", we are about comparable.

That's how expensive proper storage is. "Storage will save us", is frankly, an irresponsible lie that has killed.

Australia is already building a lot of pumped storage. E.g. snowy 2 alone has 350 GWh of storage. Im skeptical of the idea that this + solar + wind costs more than nuclear + this even without free catastrophe insurance but id be curious to see your numbers.

(Obviously some form of storage would also be necessary for nuclear power which cant adjust output to match variable demand).

It is pretty cheap to build pumped storage, relatively. Pumping water uphill isnt too complicated. Until a few months ago though the cheapest "battery" was still natural gas.

Pumped storage is an unsexy 100 year old technology and it doesnt have a huge lobby doing public relations like the nuke industry so when big projects go ahead we tend not to hear about it but there are tons in the pipeline all over.

That's all is valid only if you have geography and water for such stunt.

This, along with wind turbine bird death thing, is one of the more bizarre objections Ive heard emanating from the carbon + nuclear public relations lobbies.

There isnt a shortage of up. The geography to make it work isnt rare:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potenti...

Geography plus water plus land usage concerns make it rare. The western US has plenty of sites identified but little water to spare. There is one pumped hydro storage project in process in the entire USA and it is being challenged on environmental concerns. If we are going to make pumped hydro work these issues do need to be acknowledged.

The paucity of projects in the US is because about 50% of your electricity comes from natural gas. If it's very cheap (and it was) and you dont care about CO2 (& the US doesnt) it renders most kinds of storage fairly pointless.

Pretty much the only place without suitable geography in the US for pumped storage is Florida.

In Europe hydropower in the alps is already being used as a giant battery.

Significant new pumped storage capacity requires building large new dams, which is even more unpopular in populated areas than building nuclear.

They're specifically signalling an interest in Small Nuclear Power Reactors [1] which are less accident prone, deferring cost analysis until Dec 2024 [2], and looking for more of a global uptake to bring costs down [3]

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

[2] https://www.iaea.org/projects/crp/i12007

[3] "Achieving the lower end of the nuclear SMR range requires that SMR is deployed globally in large enough numbers to bring down costs available to Australia." (linked GenCost Report, page 58)

> which are less accident prone.

All nuclear powerplants are cheap and free from accidents when they only exist as Powerpoint reactors. Reality has had a tendency to change that.

Ditto all technology - Bhopal disaster, collapsed dams, Texas power grid failures, etc. etc. etc.

Not all reactor designs are Chernobyl, Fukishima killed far fewer than the Tsunami that triggered it.

Small reactors have a long less than public reactor in submarines and elsewhere and have failure modes that are less destructive than larger scale early generation nuclear plants.

They're signaling open mindedness to what is currently vaporware.

If those small reactors are cheap and the industry agrees to assume full liability for whatever goes wrong Id be impressed but I could see nuclear fusion taking off before that ever happens.

Equally does it take into account all the costs of global warming?

> because renewable energy production can drop to zero

On a small scale, yes, but on a large enough scale that's not the case. There's always wind or sunshine somewhere. You do need to have good transport and interconnections to take advantage of that, though.

Nobody has built to that scale, and you would need a global energy grid which all countries share. Sounds like a pipe dream.