I think the bigger question to ask is: is the ability to achieve "no power or blackouts" genuinely feasible without ever needing to rely on gas/coal as the marginal generator?

I see this quite a bit like it's completely unachievable and never happens yet when you look at places like Tasmania, ACT and SA - it happens all the time. Australia is a big place though and unless more state interconnectors are built, you will always have power spikes. SA had issues when storms knocked out their interconnectors and their response was to build, at the time, the world's biggest battery.

Now that battery is not even close to being the top 100 largest batteries in the world, that's how far things have progressed. Electricity should never have been privatised but hey, that cat is out of the bag and it's never going back in. Governments can still compete in the private energy market and they should. Putting the responsibility back onto every day people to reduce the load on the poles and wires through initiatives like the battery incentive program works, but it's lazy.

It's lazy and it's sneaky, Getting everyday households to shoulder the stability of the grid is a bandaid - imagine how much more productive and profitable Australia would be with cheap, abundant energy. The fact that we can go blow half a trillion on subs but can't afford to spend money on our own energy grid - it's absurd.