Apart from the first Q&A on cost comparisons by generation type in comments below, selected questions submitted to panellists on or before the night are being posted separately, so each has its own thread.
The full anonymised list of questions is here.
Hi Ben. You've thrown some alphabet soup energy nerds jargon in there!
There is an unfortunate shortage of reputable reports.
"LCOE" is being used and abused like a political propaganda tool.
Remember, the cost of generation is only about a third of your total bill.
If someone throws "LCOE" at you, that's the Levelised Cost of Energy (and by the way, it's usually specific to one form of energy: Electricity) then there are several possibilities:
They don't really know what they are talking about (quite likely) OR (even worse)
They are trying to bamboozle or mislead you (or the energy minister)
What is LCOE? Very simply it is a simple *single number* answer to this question:
Q: If I was to charge one simple, constant c/kWh (or $/MWh) price for every single unit of energy generated by my [fill-in-the-blank: wind farm, solar farm, hydro plant, nuclear plant, coal plant, gas plant, whatever-plant] over its whole life, so that I could recover my investment, pay the interest on the debt, give dividends to my shareholders, pay the workers, pay for the spare parts and tradies and any fuel I need...what would that number be?
The answer to this question is not an investment grade metric.
It is also not high quality information for planning or government policy.
It tells you nothing about transmission and distribution (or storage) or what it costs to keep generation EXACTLY in balance with loads every second of every day, which is what it takes to avoid blackouts (system collapse).
What really matters is the total system cost for the whole power system.
And what ultimately matters is how that translates into the prices at your electricity meter and mine, and every Australian home and business and factory.
I hope that helps answer your question.