Energy minister Josh Frydenberg has declared he would welcome the construction of a new coal-fired power plant in Australia ahead of meetings on Tuesday where internal critics of his electricity plan are expected to voice their objections.

Frydenberg used an interview with News Corp to send the positive signal about coal before Tuesday’s internal deliberations, with some Nationals still on the war path about the government either subsidising new coal plants or bankrolling the refurbishment of existing assets.



While economic modelling associated with the national energy guarantee assumes there will be no new coal built under the policy, Frydenberg said: “I would welcome a new coal-fired power station for our country because it supplies reliable baseload power and it has served us well in the past and will continue to serve us well in the future.”

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Frydenberg said the national energy guarantee would prolong the operating life of the existing coal fleet – an eventuality which some of the state and territory governments, which will ultimately make or break the policy, profoundly object to.

“We have twenty coal-fired power stations in Australia today with an average life of 27 years,” the federal energy minister said. “While they may not live forever, they will certainly live longer than that 27 years and the Neg will provide that level of stability for the investors and the owners of those assets.”

He said under the guarantee, “the reliability that coal provides the system will be valued and [coal is] much more likely to be staying in the system under the Neg than not”.

In order to bolster the case for the Neg, and keep a lid on the internal complaints from restive conservatives, Frydenberg has organised a delegation of business leaders to address a special meeting of the Coalition backbench committee on energy and the environment early on Tuesday morning, before the regular gathering of the Coalition party room.

The most outspoken critics of the policy are the former prime minister Tony Abbott and the chairman of the backbench energy and environment committee Craig Kelly. Nationals, who met separately on Monday, are divided on the policy.

Nationals MP Mark Coulton told Guardian Australia before Tuesday’s discussion the Neg was “heading in the right direction” but he said the government needed to be highly attentive to safeguarding reliability and power price reductions.

“I think we are on the right track but we have to look after affordability and reliability,” Coulton said. “Wherever this lands I’m concerned to make sure my oldies [in his electorate of Parkes] can still afford to run their air conditioners.”

He said of his colleagues there were different views about the Neg, but he said the junior Coalition partner had not split into “camps”.

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Fellow National John “Wacka” Williams said he believed the Neg was “a step to defeat an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax”.

But like Coulton, he said lower power prices and reliability needed to be paramount in the government’s thinking. He said power companies “had to guarantee supply and if they fail to do that, it gives the government the option of stepping in to guarantee supply, and that means building a coal-fired power plant”.

Victorian National Andrew Broad, who is a supporter of the Neg, has been pushing behind the scenes for months for the government to supplement the policy by funding the refurbishment of the existing coal fleet to extend the operating life of the new coal plants and lower their greenhouse gas emissions.

“I think the government should provide a fund to assist with that process,” Broad said.

Dissidents have been escalating their criticisms about the Neg over the past fortnight because the current sitting is their last chance to try to scuttle the policy, or lock Frydenberg into a no-compromise posture, before a make-or-break meeting of state and territory energy ministers in early August.

Any state or territory could veto the Neg when the Coag energy council meets in August. The ACT has warned it will be very difficult to sign up if Frydenberg is not in a position to offer any compromises.

Tuesday’s backbench committee meeting will be attended by representatives of the Business Council of Australia, the Minerals Council of Australia, BHP, the National Farmers Federation and the Ai Group – groups that are all broadly supportive of the government’s energy policy.

Also in Canberra this week is a coalition of environment and activist groups that are focussing attention on Labor as the policy moves into end game. A number of environment groups have warned the Neg contains an emissions reduction target that is too modest to see Australia meet its commitments under the Paris climate agreement.