Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during his tour of the Snowy Hydro Tumut 3 power station in Talbingo on Thursday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Last month Malcolm Turnbull assailed Labor for giving priority to renewable energy. Labor was "drunk on left ideology," he said, as the lights went out in South Australia yet again and the Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW was ordered to shut down to free up enough electricity for households. The Prime Minister called for new coal-fired power plants to be built: "As the world's largest coal exporter, we have a vested interest in showing that we can provide both lower emissions and reliable baseload power with state-of-the-art clean-coal-fired technology." It would cost billions, of course. The electricity and gas industries, through the Energy Council, said that such a plant was "uninvestable". Turnbull's ministers countered that the Turnbull government could be prepared to subsidise a new, clean, coal-fired electricity station. But it emerged that the only company prepared to step forward to claim the subsidy and build such a plant was a Clive Palmer venture. Talk of a new coal power station was heard no more.

Illustration: John Shakespeare Then South Australia's Premier Jay Weatherill announced his own plan for his state's electricity. The national market, he said, was "broken". His $550 million plan is to build a new gas-fired power plant and battery storage to provide reliability. Turnbull's Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg denounced him for "going it alone". Turnbull needed another idea, and he needed it fast. So on Wednesday his press office gave an advance briefing to the newspapers, and on Thursday Turnbull announced his new idea. Celia Pacquola with Luke McGregor and Rob Sitch in Utopia. It was nation-building. It was the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme 2.0. It was "an electricity game-changer", he said. It would cost about $2 billion and take about four years. It was a 30-year vision put together in less than three weeks.

Feasibility studies? the last sentence in Turnbull's announcement said: "A feasibility study is expected to be completed before the end of the year, and construction can commence soon after." So he already knows the result of the feasibility study? Of course not. In fact, it was plain from the chief executive of the Snowy Hydro scheme, Paul Broad, that this is not a plan so much as a concept. Broad said in a Sky News interview on Thursday night that studies were needed on the geological feasibility, the technological feasibility and the financial feasibility. A former adviser to Turnbull on electricity, Danny Price of Frontier Economics, said Turnbull's announcement was a "thought bubble", that "all we've got is full-on politics". Said Price: "We have an emergency that needs to be managed now, not with thought bubbles." So Turnbull has taken the advice of the prime ministerial press secretary from Utopia. He's committed his government to the project before knowing whether it's feasible. Or not.

In fact, deliberations on this project were so sketchy that Turnbull hadn't even consulted its majority shareholders. The Commonwealth owns only 13 per cent of the Snowy Hydro corporation. The majority shareholder is the state of NSW with 58 per cent and Victoria with the remaining 29. What if the majority owners didn't want to pay their share of the estimated $2 billion, reporters asked? Turnbull said the federal government would be "happy" to pay the lot. That was a tough negotiation. It's enough to make you wonder. Was Utopia political satire, or political instruction manual? Weatherill said the plan was "an insult" to South Australia. The head of one of Australia's biggest power companies, Jon Stretch of ERM Power, said that if "this stupid anxiety between the states and the feds doesn't stop, we are in deep trouble". He said that "if we cannot get an environment where people are going to invest, nothing will happen". As for last month's brilliant plan for a new coal-fired electricity plant, well, that was very last month: "Turnbull drives stake through heart of fossil fuel industry," was the headline on the RenewEconomy website announcing Turnbull's Snowy proposal.

The site's editor, Giles Parkinson, wrote: "By promoting pumped hydro, Turnbull is effectively signing the death knell for any new coal or gas fired generation built by the private sector, and is paving the way for a 100 per cent renewable energy grid, driven mostly by wind and solar." "By adding pumped hydro, and distributed battery storage" in homes, and buildings, "Australia can reach a 100 per cent renewable energy target, possibly within a few decades." He cited an ANU expert, Andrew Blakers, in support: "It's game over for gas, it's game over for nuclear. Solar PV and wind have won the race." And guess what? All this, and the Turnbull government hasn't yet produced its electricity policy. It's still waiting for the official review it commissioned from Chief Scientist Alan Finkel. The Finkel report is supposed to form the basis of the government's policy. So Turnbull is not only crashing ahead regardless of feasibility, he's charging forth in the absence of an overall policy. Apart from the sheer incoherence of all this political freneticism, consider the larger implications. This is a Liberal Prime Minister announcing a federal government intervention to build a new electricity storage and generation project.

"This is a dramatic change, a massive government intervention, in an area that has always been a state responsibility, electricity" says a senior Liberal. "The Liberal party is now a party of state intervention." What would Malcolm Turnbull have said of this in the days when he was a pro-market man, sceptical of government intervention in the economy? We know what he'd have said, because this is what he said of Kevin Rudd's National Broadband Network. When Rudd's initial plan for the NBN failed because of a lack of suitable private bids to build it, Turnbull, then the opposition leader, wrote: "In order to distract attention from the total failure of his broadband policy, Rudd made an even grander promise" of a bigger scheme paid for entirely by the federal government. If you insert the words "coal-fired electricity policy" instead of broadband, you can see what Turnbull would have made of his own Snowy announcement.

The Malcolm of 2009 continued in a piece in The Australian newspaper that the prime minister's plans "are not supported by a business plan, a financial study, advice from Infrastructure Australia or, so far as we know, anything other than his desire to get a big headline (it worked)." He concluded with this demand of Rudd: "Prime Minister, show us the numbers before you spend the money." One Liberal wag this week said that Turnbull's Snowy plan was even more dubious than Rudd's NBN: "The NBN had more detail — at least it was worked out on the back of an envelope." The era of the market is dead, it seems, and nation-building is back, at any cost. Today, Turnbull leads a government building the NBN and now committed to a Snowy scheme of unknown feasibility. Oddly enough, the political class is assuming this power to step into the market at will at the very time that public confidence in government is at a record low.

Says ANU's Ian McAllister: "Trust in politicians is at its lowest at any time since we started surveying it, all the way back to 1969." The latest figures were so low that McAllister said he "thought it was a data loading error and I had to go back to check the numbers." Loading The political scientists, at least, are prepared to check the numbers, even if the prime minister isn't. Peter Hartcher is the political editor.