On Monday, The Australian Financial Review published criticism by Steven Hamilton of the analysis I did on including nuclear power into the National Electricity Market. Hamilton has made strong but erroneous points about the analysis.

It seems Hamilton’s big point is that the modelling must be doing something wrong because the annual average utilisation of renewables does not change with the introduction of nuclear and there must be a lot of spilled renewable electricity – that is, where renewables are turned down because there is too much generation. Hamilton concluded that I must have ignored times when there was surplus renewable electricity.