South Australia power prices to rise to highest in the world, page-7

At the heart of SA's very public energy security and pricing problems is the state of flux of powergen technologies, conflict of interest with security and pricing by an increasingly privatised energy market and the complexities and subtleties that produces and the difficultly of good political decisions from individual states and an erstwhile detached federal government. A long, mouthful of a sentence, but I was determined to put it into just one.

Imo, the federal government needs to step in to offer targeted and effective analysis, planning and implementation. It is probably only the federal government that can step in to purchase critical powergen assets like the peaking Snowy scheme and possibly fund several new, well placed ultra clean coal powergen plants. Public assets like that would have sufficient market clout to curb the worst behaviour of the private energy market where assets are shutdown temporarily and permanently to maximise powergen pricing for them. Blacking out states, cities and regions seems of little concern to the privatised energy operators.

I do think that the Turnbull Government is on the right track with energy security and pricing initiatives and I think it will occupy much of the remaining time to the next federal election. Watch this space imo.

Dex