The power house that might just save the Coalition government.

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The political climate surrounding energy policy in Australia is febrile. However, nervous and feverish excitement is hardly conducive to sensible solutions.

Bill Shorten’s Labor opposition is turning itself inside out as it struggles to come to grips with the political punishment that will be meted out by voters who have already worked out that its 50% RET is guaranteed to destroy jobs with the same impunity it has destroyed South Australia’s electricity grid.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Turnbull is pushing the construction of high-efficiency, low-emissions (HELE) coal-fired power plant using, in the mother of all ironies, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to fund that move.

Turnbull’s rush to embrace coal-fired power has two solid rationales: to prevent another South Australia from occurring somewhere else in the Commonwealth; and to help stave off One Nation’s looming attack on the Liberal National Party…