The Australian Capital Territory deputy chief minister, Simon Corbell, has urged the Turnbull government to get its story straight on renewable energy targets before Friday’s special meeting of energy ministers convened after power blackouts in South Australia.



Corbell, in an interview with Guardian Australia on Tuesday, said the former federal environment minister Greg Hunt, on the sidelines of global climate talks in Paris last December, had clearly urged the states to adopt reverse auctions, following the model developed successfully in the ACT to drive the uptake of renewable energy.

Hunt said in Paris the federal government was not proposing a change to the national renewable energy target, “but I have encouraged the states that if they want to do something extra, [they should] apply reverse auctions to the renewable energy target in the way the Australian Capital Territory has done”.

Now, Corbell said, the government had abruptly switched course, raising concerns about state-based renewable energy schemes following the South Australian blackouts. The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, last week linked the SA blackout to the state’s use of renewable energy, calling it a “wake-up call” for state leaders who were trying to hit “completely unrealistic” renewable targets.

“The inconsistency here is very clear,” Corbell said on Tuesday.

Corbell will attend Friday’s meeting even though the ACT is in caretaker mode in preparation for an election on 15 October. He sought and was given an agreement by the Canberra Liberals to attend the discussion because in the ACT, the target of 100% renewables by 2020, is bipartisan policy.

Corbell said Liberals in the ACT had overcome their initial resistance to the scheme, and had now come to the view that renewable energy was “very popular, and it works” – creating jobs in the region.

The South Australian government has already signalled it wants Friday’s meeting to canvas whether there should be a national “emissions intensity” trading scheme for the electricity sector – a development that would reopen the debate around carbon pricing.

The SA premier, Jay Weatherill, has been pushing for the adoption of a national scheme that would work as a form of emissions trading for the electricity sector. Generators would be penalised for polluting above an emissions-intensity baseline, to help drive an orderly transition to low-emissions energy sources.

But Josh Frydenberg, who got the environment portfolio from Hunt in the post-election reshuffle, and has also assumed responsibility for energy policy, has signalled there will be no consideration of a change to the Coalition’s Direct Action scheme until a review scheduled for 2017.

Corbell said the ACT was open to discussion about a new emissions intensity scheme but that any trading scheme would need to “complement state-based renewable energy targets, not replace them”.

He said an emissions intensity scheme would give preference to gas as a coal alternative in the short term to deliver base load power, and the danger with that was a carbon-trading scheme would lock in gas as a medium term option “at the expense of a secure pipeline for solar and wind.”

Corbell said the government needed to use the forum of the Coag energy council to align climate policy and energy policy in the operation of the national energy market. “There has been a complete failure of federal government leadership of this council – they have resolutely avoided the [alignment of climate and energy policy] for years.”

On Tuesday Weatherill announced there would be an independent inquiry into the blackouts, led by former South Australia police commissioner Gary Burns. That review will cover the state government and emergency response to the outage.

The Australian Energy Market Operator is expected to issue a separate report this week, before Friday’s meeting, establishing the sequence that led to the power outages.