[davidbanham]

In Sydney there’s so much rooftop solar generation that feed-in tariffs for grid connections frequently go negative. Ie: you have to pay the grid to have it take your excess power.

From memory South Australia has had multiple occasions of being 100% powered by renewables with all their fossil generators shut down.

Yeah we definitely have work to do in completing the shift away from coal. The natural gas export contract situation is a shambles which makes it difficult to use for the transition as planned. It’s certainly not doom and gloom, though, and apart from lines getting aced by trees falling during storms, the wall holes are always full of electrons at my place.

[caf]

The current operating requirements in South Australia mandate around 80MW of gas generation for system strength reasons.

So even on last Saturday when "operational demand" in South Australia reached the ballpark of -200MW (that is, rooftop solar generation was exceeding the demand in the state by 200MW), there was still 80MW of gas in the mix. (The excess was being exported to Victoria).