Australian power play

Not all states are prepared to back the federal government's pledge to put reliability of power supply over green considerations

Traumatised by the "System Black" failure that cut power to large areas of an entire state a year ago, Australia's federal government has done an about-face on energy policy: it's adopting reliability of supply over reducing emissions. But will Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull be able to make the new policy stick? In late 2017 he was trying to convince state governments that the new National Energy Guarantee (NEG) was the appropriate replacement for the Clean Energy Target (CET) that, it's widely believed, lay behind the outages in South Australia. This state relies much more heavily than others on renewables to keep the lights on. However, those states with Labour governments continue to ins