Australia doesn’t have an energy crisis – we have a political crisis, a media crisis, a competition crisis and a pricing crisis.

It has been 12 months since South Australia’s state-wide “system black” (AKA blackout) thrust energy politics onto the front page, where it has been a fixture all year.

While the network operators gained important experience from the tornado induced blackout, politics and the media embraced the adage “never waste a good crisis”.

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The Minerals Council embarked on a year-long campaign to sell us so called “high efficiency, low emissions (HELE)” coal technology – poorly named as the expensive plants are not especially efficient and at best only 10-20% less polluting than regular coal power plants (Should we call them “slightly lower intensity, more expensive’, or SLIME for short?).

The media has sensationalised every piece of energy news. When Aemo released a report earlier this month explaining that if we don’t take any of the measures we’re already taking, the Victorian grid might, in a high demand scenario, be only 99.99775% reliable (a graph on page of the report indicates “unserved energy” for Victoria this summer of 0.00225%, which translates to 99.99775%), two senior ABC journalists reported “we’re going to have blackouts” and that we have a “very real crisis”. This despite the chair of the Energy Security Board Dr Kerry Schott’s reassurance: “I don’t see it as a crisis.”

In retrospect energy minister Josh Frydenberg probably wishes he never commissioned chief scientist professor Alan Finkel to conduct the most wide-ranging review of our power system since the formation of the national electricity market (NEM) in 1998.

Despite Finkel’s superhuman efforts to be sensitive to the politics and Frydenberg’s adroit sales job to the Coalition’s “broad church” – I’ve never seen a better PowerPoint deck from an MP – the tribal instincts of the backbench just couldn’t swallow any plan that doesn’t taste like coal.

If you hold the Finkel report at arm’s length, you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference between the business as usual (BAU) and the clean energy target (CET) scenarios. Both show a withdrawal of ageing coal capacity over the next 20 years, and both show it being replaced by renewables, simply because renewable energy is now cheaper than both gas and new coal.

Had backbenchers read the report, they would have understood Finkel’s very careful argument that the CET provides a mechanism to make the transition at a lower cost and with more stability than BAU.

With the Finkel review, the Coalition picked a scab, and the conflict between tribal ideology and reality refuses to let it heal. The festering wound is weeping bad ideas.

Propping up decrepit coal power stations is not an answer. WA’s Muja AB coal power station will shut this month, only two years since WA’s Barnett government spent $300m on a refurbishment. A federal lifeline to Liddell would no doubt repeat that colossal waste.

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Building new coal power in Queensland is not an answer – the state is a net power exporter, has the youngest generation fleet and is building a mass of new renewables capacity.

Investing in carbon capture and storage plants is not an answer – there are only two such plants in the world, and they’re both tiny yet horrendously expensive. No energy utility anywhere, including the owners of the two demonstration plants, intends to build another CCS plant.

Building new coal (HELE, SLIME or otherwise) is not an answer – the power is too expensive and the emissions are too high.

But does it matter that the government is flying like the mythical oozlum bird in ever decreasing circles and that the media is scaring the wits out of half the population? Not as much as you might think – we’ve had silly national debates on energy before, but this time it’s different.

Previously, when conservative governments have turned their attention to renewable energy, the whole sector has downed tools, waiting with bated breath for the death sentence.

In 2006-7, when prime minister John Howard disregarded the recommendations of the Tambling review, the ensuing uncertainty resulted in the closure of wind turbine factories in Wynyard, Tasmania and Portland, Victoria. If it wasn’t for the Victorian government’s renewable energy targets (VRET), the sector would have packed it in.

In 2014 prime minister Tony Abbott did his best to kill the renewables industry by commissioning a review from climate-science denier and former oil-man Dick Warburton. The renewables sector went into a torpor – no consideration for the thousands who lost their jobs.

This time, however, industry hasn’t skipped a beat. More than $8bn has been committed to renewables so far this year, and hardly a week goes by without a new project announcement or a new price record being shattered.

Aemo and Arena will soon trial Demand Response, a technology that allow large users of energy to be rewarded for shifting their demand away from peaks.

Both the SA and Victorian governments are investing in batteries to provide grid stability services. SA has leased a fleet of fast-response turbine generators in case its grid is caught short this summer - think of it as insurance.

But what would we do if the federal government wasn’t hamstrung by ideologues?

We’d go hard on prime minister Turnbull’s plan to add more pumped-hydro storage capacity to the Snowy and Tasmanian hydro schemes. The upgraded hydro schemes would have a reduced dependency on rainfall and would simplify and lower the costs of balancing the grid.

We should be looking now to improve the interconnections between the states. Once built, the stronger connections would improve system security and bring down prices through competition. A second major cable from Tasmania to Victoria would make best use of upgraded hydro and the phenomenally valuable Roaring Forties wind energy resource. Business plans for additional transmission lines strengthening the connections between SA, NSW and Queensland have been sitting on shelves for years.

We need to push through regulations that are keeping grid stabilising batteries out of the market and put an end to blatant market gaming that’s driving up prices.

As coal generators leave the market, we lose the benefit of the huge rotating masses that provide valuable inertia that maintains system frequency – valuable, but not valued. Other technologies – including wind, solar and batteries – can provide inertia, but won’t until either regulation compels or a market encourages. We should be regulating or building these markets now.

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Aemo has clearly stated that we need more dispatchable power, and ordinarily the high price signals would bring this into the market. Our energy policy mess has weakened these signals. A series of modest technology-agnostic auctions for dispatchables, open to those without large market share, may be required to bring in much needed competition.

Among all the noise, it’s worth noting that SA has long moved beyond talk and is implementing an “all of the above” strategy. With decreasing price volatility and more competition, future federal governments will show off (rather than denigrate) the pioneering state.

The prescription at the federal level is simple. Industry has been nothing if not consistent and unified in its advice to government – set the ground rules and get out of the way.

The current energy debate has exposed us to the “energy trilemma” – the concept that it is handwringly difficult to provide power that is reliable, affordable and that fulfils our commitments to both the Paris agreement and future generations.

It’s actually not that hard. New technologies, dramatic cost reductions and our world-leading markets, institutions and expertise provide us with a path. The vast array of participants in the energy sector are getting on with the task at hand – but it would so much easier if it wasn’t happening in spite of our leaders.