Coal-fired power plants need to come back online to provide relief from the energy crisis gripping the east coast, according to federal Resources Minister Madeleine King.
An urgent meeting of Commonwealth, state and territory energy ministers will be convened on Wednesday to discuss the dire situation, as demand and prices for gas on the east coast soars.
The new federal government has described the predicament as the result of a "perfect storm", as increased international demand for Australian gas landed as a severe cold snap stretched much of the country, and unplanned outages of coal-fired power stations impacted the broader electricity market.
Ms King has been working the phones in an attempt to get Australian gas producers to inject more supply into the system, but noted their efforts were constrained due to existing pipelines operating at near capacity and a lack of gas shipping infrastructure across the country.
She said the short-term solution to the crisis was with Australia's ageing fleet of coal-fired electricity generation — some of which had experienced maintenance delays.
"What we really need to do is to have the coal power stations come back online, because that is the missing piece in the puzzle right now," Ms King told the ABC.
Ms King dismissed suggestions the federal government may need to support the return to service of coal-fired power stations.
"To be honest, it is the coal companies themselves and the operators of the power stations that need to get these power stations back online," she said.
"It's 30 per cent of the energy capacity that's taken out of the mix because of unforeseen circumstances in many respects — and some of them are also planned outages.
"It wouldn't matter how much money anyone put in right now, we just need the operators to get moving on fixing their plants right now."
Labor has pinned the blame for the current crisis on the Coalition, accusing the former government of botching energy policy in failing to bolster investment over the course of nine years in office.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the Coalition "spent the best part of a decade picking fights on energy, rather than building resilience and certainty into the system".
Former energy minister Angus Taylor rubbished the suggestion.
"We've seen record levels of investment in household solar and renewables more generally — the highest levels of household solar in the world — one of the highest rates of investment per capita in renewables in the world," he told the ABC.
"But that's got to be matched with dispatchability — it's why gas is crucial.
"It's crucial now, with very strong inflationary pressures, that the new government work closely with the gas producers to balance the grid ... that there be careful investment in transmission."
East coast gas reservation would be 'hard to reverse engineer'
Ms King said all options were on the table when it came to discussing longer-term solutions to the gas crisis, including a possible gas reservation policy.
That would ensure Australian gas producers had to ensure a portion of their supplies were allocated solely to the domestic market, rather than lucrative exports.
The Western Australian government has such a policy in place, with 15 per cent of gas produced in the state reserved for local consumption.
The reservation policy has spared WA from soaring gas prices, but Ms King argued it would be hard to implement on the east coast.
"The gas reservation policy of Western Australia was a very great political struggle to introduce, it was very hard on the then state Labor government, and a lot of people lost a lot of political skin in that fight," she said.
"It was also part of the design of the export industry — so it came in at the same time, and was also part of, the investment decisions of international investors into the WA gas production system.
Coalition attacks government over negotiations with gas companies
On Sunday, new Nationals leader David Littleproud questioned the government's ability to work with the nation's biggest gas companies to solve the crisis, suggesting Mr Taylor would have had a better chance of getting them to cooperate.
"That's really nice of David Littleproud to demean me in that fashion, but I guess that's what the old-style Nationals are all about in respect of women and women in power," Ms King replied on Tuesday.
"I was actually quite offended by it.
"I was actually able to pick up the phone and have these discussions and perhaps I don't take the strong-arm approach of ... Angus Taylor — I rather prefer to ask these people, these leaders in our economy, how they can help."
Newly appointed Shadow Energy Minister Ted O'Brien also took aim at Energy Minister Chris Bowen, arguing he was leaving it to others to fix the crisis.
"Now Chris Bowen, he has spent years demonising the gas industry, when we introduced as a government measures to introduce more gas security, to help with the transition," Mr O'Brien said.
"He was first out of the blocks criticising it, in his words, calling it a fraud.
"It's no wonder that Anthony Albanese, as the new prime minister, is not having his new energy minister deal with it with the gas producers — Madeleine King has to do it."
