All power to Monash Forum

Minister for Energy Josh Frydenberg. Picture: AAP

Groupings within parliamentary parties are not uncommon. Labor has its factions. The Coalition also has its factions, although they are looser than Labor’s. Within the Liberals, there is Christopher Pyne’s Black Hand group.

In the past, there was the Lyons Forum and the Modest Members. In this sense, the Monash Forum is just part of that tradition.

Mind you, Monash is an excellent choice by which to name this new forum. He was an outstanding military man and he drove the ­development of low-cost, brown-coal-fired electricity generation in Victoria.

Now Malcolm Turnbull and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg would claim to share the objectives of this new forum: to ensure ­affordable and reliable electricity for households and businesses.

But both men place a higher priority on the electricity sector meeting the Paris climate agreement commitments (26 to 28 per cent cut to emissions by 2030 from 2005 levels) that they enthusiastically embrace. Let’s be clear, the emissions cuts drive the policy ­options, not the need for affordable and reliable electricity. No doubt the Monash Forum members have worked that out.

Now it’s all very well Frydenberg telling us that coal will still be part of the electricity generation mix in 2030 — at maybe 60 per cent. Duh, we all say: some coal-fired power stations will still be chugging out low-cost electricity at that point.

But there won’t have been any new coal-fired power stations built between now and then, even the high-efficiency, low-emissions ones favoured by Japan (41 new ones), China (more than 100) and other Asian countries. The members of the Monash Forum will have worked that out too.

Also, don’t believe Frydenberg’s guff about his beloved ­national energy guarantee being technology-agnostic. It’s no such thing. It favours low-emissions technology over higher emissions technology given the need to meet the Paris commitments.

And don’t accept that nonsense about there being no more subsidies for renewable energy.

The Renewable Energy Target continues until 2030 and the states and territories are handing out subsidies to new renewable projects at an incredible pace (think: states’ own renewable energy ­targets, reverse auctions, Victoria’s own trading scheme, feed-in tariffs for household solar installations and subsidies for batteries).

It is estimated that households with solar panels are being subsidised to the tune of more than $1 billion a year; this figure is ­expected to rise.

And where does Snowy 2.0 fit in? Nothing technology-agnostic about that. It’s a clear case of a government trying to pick a winner that will only work commercially if wholesale electricity prices remain high and volatile.

It’s hard to square the Prime Minister’s ­embrace of this project with electricity prices coming down.

It may be that, in the end, the national energy guarantee comes to nothing as the ACT government digs its heels in to oppose the scheme. But let’s not forget that the guarantee is a gift for the large gentailers (retailers and generators).

And among those gentailers, AGL is playing the government like a violin by maintaining its ­determination to close the coal-fired Liddell power station in NSW while offering up little in return — and all high cost and unreliable.

Given Turnbull’s dithering on this, don’t expect him to do anything. But the obvious solution is either to ensure the continuation of Liddell or its replace­ment with a coal-fired high-effic­iency low-emissions plant on the site. Now that’s something significant for the Monash Forum to discuss.