With Victoria's Hazelwood Power Station now in the process of shutting down, Malcolm Turnbull is right to resist an 11th hour push, led by Tony Abbott and supported by climate sceptics within the Coalition, to reverse the process.
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The recent debate about national energy security has been positive in that it moved on from political sniping to a discussion of options and ideas. These include the future role of rapidly evolving battery storage, improvements to the reliability of the national power grid and the prospect of a significant upgrade of Snowy Hydro.
If Mr Turnbull was to cave in on calls to spend an estimated $750 million of tax payers' money keeping a power plant its own owners don't want to save open there is a serious risk the momentum of recent weeks would be lost.
Climate change deniers would seize on the move as a major victory. Successive governments would then keep kicking the can of energy security down the road for another five or 10 years or more.
Hazelwood was one of several power stations built in the midst of Victoria's Latrobe Valley brown coal deposits in the immediate post-war era to take advantage of the abundant, and relatively low cost, energy source. It has served that state and the wider grid well.
It played a valuable role as south eastern Australia's population boomed but has now been overtaken by more environmentally friendly options which would likely prove just as, if not more, economical if a true carbon price was factored in to the brown coal cost.
Because brown coal, or lignite, has higher levels of moisture than the black, or coking, coal normally used for energy generation, the Latrobe plants have all been heavy polluters.
Brown coal's heating value is only 25 per cent of that of an equivalent amount of black coal. Much more has to be burnt to produce an equivalent amount of energy.
Hazelwood is recognised as the dirtiest generator in Australia and one of the dirtiest plants in the OECD. It emits 1.56 tonnes of CO2 for each megawatt hour of electricity and is 50 percent more polluting than the average black coal power station in NSW or Queensland.
Its closure does not come without a human cost and economic consequences. As many as 500 staff and contractors will lose their jobs progressively over the next few months and there is a strong likelihood Victorian electricity prices will rise.
That said, power price increases would have also resulted if the operator, ENGIE, had opted to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to bring the plant into line with contemporary safety standards and to ensure it was commercially viable.
Given the strong assurances from the Prime Minister and the Australian Energy Market Operator that the national electricity market has sufficient reserve capacity fill the gap left by Hazelwood's demise this appears to be the most sensible decision.
