Big declines in Ozzie renewables costs

In the US, contracts signed between utilities/cities and providers of renewable electricity are usually made public, so we can see the steady declines in costs.  In Australia, we are dependent on snippets released only every so often.   In late 2017,  AGL (a big Ozzie electricity and gas utility) announced that its new wind farm near Broken Hill (in far western NSW) would deliver electricity at A$65/MWh, and that the cost of new solar was around A$70/MWh.  This year (2020), Acciona and the Queensland state government who are building Australia's largest wind farm seem to have a contracted cost of A$44/MWh, at least according to the state energy minister, who also said that solar was down to A$50/MWh.  This compares with the cost of new coal of A$130/MWh.

What that means is that in the 2 and a half years since October 2017, wind costs have fallen 37%, and solar 28%.  This is all the more remarkable since the Australian dollar has fallen 20% over that period, which would have increased prices.

At the same time, the cost of battery storage (in US$) has fallen 60% since 2017.

In this piece I discuss how much less coal we can burn and still have a stable grid, using old-fashioned techniques such as ramping up coal burning at night and using peaking gas to balance the grid, without having to rely on li-ion battery storage.  Given how much cheaper new wind and solar are compared to new coal, and even to existing coal (with marginal/operating costs around A50-A$60/MWh) grid operators are going to favour renewables over coal most of the time.  Add the large and ongoing falls in the cost of grid-scale batteries, and it's perfectly obvious, to everybody except the dotty Right, that coal is finished.

Since the markets for wind turbines, solar panels and inverters, and batteries are global, these trends will be duplicated everywhere.  Interest rates are different in different countries, demand profiles differ, the cost of getting permits differs, but the overall trends are the same.  How much further will wind, solar and battery costs have fallen in another two and a half years?  Any coal power stations started now won't be finished for 5 years.  And by then, they will be hopelessly uneconomic.  Rational governments will be preparing for the end of coal, not pretending that it still has a future.

AS far as I can work out, the nearest town to the new Acciona wind farm is Karara.
This is a photo of their state school. (Source: Wikipedia)