Forced to act by catastrophic blackouts eliciting little more than ridicule from the federal sphere, the South Australian Labor premier has cast off the threadbare fabric of Australia's patchy national energy network.
While important questions remain, Jay Weatherill's state-first formula lights the way toward decisive leadership in a space most known for policy indolence at the national level.
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South Australia 'going it alone'
The South Australian government says it's taking back control of the state's electricity generation; the federal government accuses it of 'going alone'. Courtesy ABC News 24.
Weatherill's "dramatic intervention" has turned two decades of privatisation on its head.
He positions his response on the low plinth of lived reality rather than the high plain of idealism. It is both radical in the government versus market sense, and yet conservative from a practical outcome perspective. It takes literally Turnbull's own axiom that energy security is among the most primary responsibilities of government.
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Despite the central state's vaunted 50 per cent renewable energy target, tagged by the Turnbull government as the sole cause of its energy woes, Weatherill's plan seeks protection not from the intermittency of wind or sun but from a dysfunctional national market that fails in extremis. And for this protection, it turns to the fossil fuel of natural gas to stabilise its "inertia" problem.
The plan empowers the state energy minister to intervene, giving SA first dibs on local gas reserves to keep business and consumers up and running. Further, it "incentivises" additional gas extraction, offers farmers lucrative royalties, and, introduces a huge new electricity storage capability.
But its eccentric centrepiece is a new state-owned gas-fired generator to provide system-wide stability, and to guarantee emergency supply. How that will work and what it will cost remains problematic.
Nonetheless, these appear as practical responses after recent storm-induced blackouts and market-forced load shedding.
The political right, which normally parades its exclusive mortgage on reality, is left meandering in la la land, desperately defending a dysfunctional market that it has also neutered.
The proposition that you can have a genuine competitive "market" in energy generation without pricing a costly externality such as pollution, was always a hoax.
Turnbull has summoned east coast gas producers for talks on Wednesday to address a crisis in supply that threatens manufacturing and consumers.
While solutions are welcomed, the crisis is a symptom of past settings in gas policy, including by Labor governments. And it is also a function of the investment strike in energy generation more broadly that has arisen from the absence of a proper price signal and a mature level of bipartisanship.
Instead, policy obscurantism has denied the interplay between climate change, consumer preference, price and security, leading to a lost decade of needlessly brutal politics, and ultimately, to less secure electricity, which is rising sharply in price anyway.
A clearer example of rank politics trumping sound policy would be hard to find.