Australia has just ‘wrecked’ everything due to ‘massive confidence’ in renewables

Hmmm what gets lost in the shuffle sometimes is honest facts. From my vauge memory - I recall that the generators were very old and were long over due for replacement..... However, I also know that you can pull out one generator at a time, and upgrade them / replace them - rather than just scrap the whole lot at the same time. Kind of like a fleet of taxis or trucks.... You can pull one out at a time, drop in stronger engines with better fuel injection, gear boxes, differentials, and new turbos, and then when you put it back on the road, pull the next one out of service for a little while.... Same with the power stations... Essentially these are turbo charged incinerators, that burn pulverised (talcum powdered) coal in suspension, in air, and then feed this to giant vertical boilers, and then the steam from that goes to the turbines, coupled to the alternators, and the flue gas gets scrubbed for ash and sulphur etc., and you know the designs are pretty fucking good.... There are limits to what you can do, it's called simple physics... as to how much you can ram through the combustion process in a fixed size burner - and how much steam you can get out of the boilers and how much power you can get out of the generators.... I mean if you follow steam train technology - 100 + years ago - easy, they were nutting out how to make one ton of coal, burn better and convert more water into steam and to pull bigger loads, longer distances... and one the fasted trains they didn't stop to fill up the tender with water, from a tank, they had troughs over the tracks that they lowered a scoop into and filled the tender on the fly... The mid and latter steam trains (engines) were extraordinarily clever bits of engineering - just amazing stuff... BUT you had to do a LOT of manual maintennance and they took a long time to get the boiler really hot to make good steam under pressure, where as a diesel, you just jump in and hit the starter button... It's not that the steam trains were not great pulling engines, but they just required so much fucking around to keep them going.... and diesels - you just pull them in for fueling once a week and periodic maintenace every 10,000 Km... etc..