This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, has stared down criticism of renewable energy from Nationals MPs as the Turnbull government continues to heap public pressure on AGL about the future of the Liddell power station.

Frydenberg on Sunday used an interview on Sky News to smack down comments by the former resources minister Matt Canavan characterising renewables as a short-term sugar hit.

A motion passed by Nationals at their weekend federal conference called for subsidies for renewables to be phased out within five years.

'The lift will stop': Barnaby Joyce tells Nationals coal power can't be ignored Read more

But the energy minister said renewables were not a “short-term sugar hit”. Renewables, he said, were an important long-term contributor to Australia’s energy mix.

“Renewables are coming down significantly in price and their storage technologies are coming down year by year so renewables play an important part of the energy mix,” Frydenberg said.

After days of public strong-arming, the government will meet on Monday with the AGL chief, Andy Vesey, to discuss the future of the Liddell coal-fired power plant in New South Wales.

AGL wants to shut down that plant in 2022.

The Turnbull government wants to extend its life for an additional five years. The government says Vesey has signalled privately he is prepared to sell Liddell to a responsible owner.

On the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, the treasurer, Scott Morrison, continued the efforts to pressure AGL. He said people trying to shut down the ageing power plant had “a vested interest in talking down what the viability of it might be”.

He suggested AGL was acting in a self-interested fashion.

“It doesn’t surprise me that a big energy company wants to see a big source of supply go out of the market,” he said. “I mean, that drives prices up, and that benefits energy companies.”

Morrison was asked whether the government was prepared to assist AGL in switching Liddell from coal to gas. He said that was a decision for the company.

The treasurer said he believed there would be plenty of buyers for Liddell and he believed any new owner would be able to make the plant function effectively.

Estimates of the cost to refurbish the plant range between $500m to $1bn.

Morrison said the government was prepared to be proactive in making sure the plant remained open. He said the government wanted to keep coal-fired power stations in the mix to ensure power generation remained reliable.

Pressed on the lack of a settled policy mechanism to drive new investment in the energy sector, Morrison said the government was “seeking to land that”.

The government is yet to decide whether it will adopt the central recommendation of the Finkel review of the national electricity market – a new clean energy target.

The Coalition wants to shift the energy policy blame. Voters just want it fixed | Katharine Murphy Read more

The Finkel recommendation remains controversial in government ranks and the disposition of the National party will be critical.

Morrison suggested coal would need to be part of energy policy resolution.

Criticism of renewables subsidies by the Nationals federal conference notwithstanding, the party leader, Barnaby Joyce, has signalled he can accept a clean energy target if the threshold for certificates is set high enough to ensure “clean” coal can get a marginal benefit from the new scheme.

Morrison said on Sunday that if Labor couldn’t accept a clean energy target which encompassed coal then they would impose “higher [power] prices on the Australian people”.