Power policy is Malcolm Turnbull’s big hope of renewal

Turnbull will go back and draw from the well he ­believes will help the government revive its political fortunes.

Malcolm Turnbull will go back and draw from the well that he ­believes proffers the cure for the government to revive its political fortunes.

He will return to the snowfields today where he first announced the Snowy 2.0 hydro scheme.

The energy price crunch is rapidly becoming the top-order issue for Australian families — not to mention business and industry.

And it is one that provided the Coalition with the only meaningful bounce in opinion polls so far this year when the new Snowy scheme was announced in March.

Finding a fix to the problem of critically shortening base-load supply and punitive retail power prices — a solution Turnbull has promised to deliver — offers the Coalition a convincing platform for a sustained campaign.

There is no doubt Turnbull is on significantly stouter ground than Labor on this issue, so far as Bill Shorten remains imprisoned by the renewable energy ideologues in his own party, but there is also substantial political and electoral risk for the Prime Minister and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg if they don’t get it right.

Turnbull has scored significant victories in forcing the energy ­retailers to swallow reforms to consumer pricing rules. These will provide relief to households that have just copped energy price rises of up to 20 per cent.

Turnbull and Frydenberg will acknowledge that these changes offer only a short-term respite.

The Finkel report’s recommendation of a clean energy target, the only one of the 49 recommen­dations that the government has not yet adopted, is the crucible for whether the government lives or dies on this issue.

The conservative forces within the Coalition partyroom are ­bitterly opposed to adopting what they claim effectively amounts to a new and additional renewable ­energy target.

Turnbull and Frydenberg are wedded to it as a credible mechanism to provide certainty to the ­industry and a commitment to ­carbon emission reductions.

This will become another internal point of conflict for the Prime Minister.

The only way the partyroom will be assuaged, and reluctantly accept a target, will be through a commitment to build new, cleaner coal-fired base power stations.

The National Energy Market has been, and remains, one of the last but most bitterly contested areas of micro-economic reforms left for government.

Yet it has largely been a domain of state government responsibility; privatisation of state-owned generation and ­retails businesses being the most contentious.

While federal government has a role in setting broader national energy policy and regulation, it has rarely ventured this far into the consumer debate over retail prices.

The political paradox confronting Turnbull is that by taking this on, he has taken pressure off the states — particularly the Labor states that are most culpable for spiralling prices — and raised the expectation in the electorate’s mind that it is now the ­federal  government’s responsibility to fix it.

If Turnbull can seize the ­agenda and secure meaningful and durable policy solutions, the government can expect considerable political dividends.

The danger is that he has set his government up to share the blame with the states when the inevitable blackouts occur this summer.