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Coal is not cheap though. Or to be more accurate: coal has a bad ROI, which is what drives investment decisions. At this point in time, solar (using Chinese panels) has an ROI that outstrips coal power by a lot, and has less risk (panels start producing a lot faster and can be expanded online - a coal plant sits there costing money for 5 years till it comes online).

The problem for both the US and Australia is that private investors have no appetite for coal, because the same money can just continuously install solar and get a better return - with no real problems with environmental lobbies, access to fuel, or anything. We're probably a few years away from grid expansions being built on the basis that they'll make money from people installing solar farms in the new areas.

"Ah! But China is subsidizing it's solar industry!" you say - well "who cares?" says I, the investor who China is effectively paying to build solar plants, and who gets to take a bunch of good PR from it.

So why isn't that happening? It seems odd to me that in an ostensibly free market economy, a good investment opportunity would be ignored.

Does the government just say "no" to letting wind and solar producers add capacity?

https://youtu.be/vSz1fItPWIw

I watched this Melbourne University video which discussed this issue in detail. It went into detail on the economics of the Australian electricity market.

Sorry, that doesn't make any sense. We have no pressing need for additional baseload capacity at the moment. The problem is entirely in high-demand times, and that is entirely sourced from dispatchable generation. This is mostly gas and hydro in Australia, and the price of gas drives the price, given the way the AEMO bidding market works.

Renewable energy only takes pressure off this demand (i.e. solar is fairly well correlated with hot weather, so actually helps a lot in reducing the peak on hot days (presumably from air-conditioning etc.) by hundreds of megawatts).

Australia's number 1 problem is that the grid itself is too expensive. That isn't the Coalition, because it has been happening through the late Howard, Rudd-Gillard-Rudd, Abbott and Turnbull governments. Typical slow government problem, not any particular party. Obviously you aren't talking about that, so I didn't mention it.

Australia's number 2 problem is all our power plants are aging and shutting down. I addressed that; because you seemed to be talking to it (eg, Liddel is only achieving something like 46% capacity). That is a looming issue. The problem here is also not the Coalition, as I mentioned.

Now SA appears to have a tertiary problem which is they have lots of wind energy and not enough storage to balance out the grid. The battery is addressing that and seems to be going well. This is also nothing to do with the Coalition, because the SA state government controls SA and the majority bounces between the two majors. The Weatherill government seems to have had the battery installed extremely quickly despite whatever you think the Coalition did to prevent it.

You aren't assigning blame correctly here. The big picture problem isn't that gas prices are high, and power problems aren't happening because of "mostly the Coalition".

And the grid is too expensive because the regulator allowed an effectively risk-free rate of return on investment that was too good to pass up.

In telecoms wholesale pricing in Australia, there would frequently be adjustments to the claimed capital costs to remove this gold plating incentive, but the energy side seemed to be much more accepting of whatever the distributors claimed.

Fortunately, people have crunched the numbers:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/plunging-costs-make-solar-wind-a...

The Coalition doesn't want cheap - they've spun coal so hard it's no longer politically tenable to unspin it.

isn't their only major energy investment a bigger hydro dam?

I mean, I haven't crunched the numbers, but unless wind/solar are legitimately the most cost effective options (which historically they most certainly have not been) then you would have to be a real risk taker to get involved.

Really?

The 2017 Lazard report (which I think is generally pretty well regarded) has them at:

Coal, min: 60, max: 143

Wind, min: 30, max: 60

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

There are plenty of other sources on that page. You'll quickly find that most show wind power being cheaper than coal since around 2012 (even without a carbon price).

Looking at solar and wind historically doesn’t make any sense. They’re emerging technologies with rapidly decreasing cost. You have to look at their costs now, not from before.