These costs are so big the NEM has been failing to send the price signals to private investors to prompt them to commit to building the new infrastructure.

Even if nobody would say so, the NEM was dying, at least as a machine to direct investment. You could see this every time a state or federal government stepped into the market to insist upon a coal station staying open or a gas plant being built, or when they announced support for new fixes like Renewable Energy Zones.

Recently this process has been ramping up. In September, Queensland announced a plan to wind up its coal fleet by 2030. On Wednesday the federal, Tasmanian and Victorian governments announced they would co-operate to finance new interstate transmission connections.

On Thursday the Andrews government declared it would provide $1 billion to deliver 4.5 gigawatts of renewable power over 10 years to replace capacity from the Loy Yang A coal-fired power plant which will close in 2035, and accelerate its emissions reduction target by up to 80 per cent of 2005 levels by 2035 and reach net-zero by 2045.

As the former energy regulator Kerry Schott told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, this will kill off what coal remains in the system even faster, because coal generators will not be able to compete with the cheaper new renewables.

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This in turn will help Premier Daniel Andrews meet his big new emissions targets. But AI Group energy analyst Tennant Reed believes knocking out coal alone will not be enough. The government will have to help households and industry move faster to substitute gas with electrification of cooking, heating and cooling, and by introducing hydrogen and biofuels.

Will Andrews’ plan cut costs to households, as he claims?

Schott explains in typically blunt terms that because “Vladimir Putin has been buggering us all around” energy prices will remain high, while renewables make electricity for free.

But only once the new infrastructure is in place.

And how much will that infrastructure cost?

Well, according to calculations by the Grattan Institute, once all the sums are done, all that new generation and transmission tech will see renewables cost about as much as fossils in the long run.

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