The electricity market is such a mare's nest of stuff-ups and problems it's impossible to see the deeply divided Turnbull government making much progress in fixing it.
The goals of halting runaway power prices and reducing the risk of summer blackouts wouldn't be quite so daunting, for instance, were it not for the third goal of "sustainability" - the euphemism you use when you can't say "climate change".
It's tempting to focus on the first two and forget the third, but even that wouldn't work because the inescapable reality of climate change means that, until the Turnbull government ends the "policy uncertainty" about its treatment of fossil fuels relative to renewables, it's unlikely to get sufficient investment in new production capacity to keep prices controlled.
Even if Turnbull were to patch together some weakened version of an (already toned down) clean energy target, that wouldn't do the trick if it failed to win the endorsement of the alternative government.
Even so, the industry's line that ending the policy uncertainty is pretty much all you need to fix the problem is self-serving bulldust.
Ditto the Coalition's line that government subsidies (via the renewable energy target) to renewable energy, with its fatal flaw of "intermittency", are the heart of the problem.
The environmental damage done by burning fossil fuels is a significant "social cost" to the community. If you're not prepared to use some form of carbon pricing to internalise this "externality" then subsidising the cost of emissions-free energy is the next-best policy.
The good news is that the cost of renewable energy and storage is falling so fast it won't be long before it can compete against socially unpriced fossil fuels without explicit subsidy.
Economic rationalists are always preaching that governments shouldn't attempt to "pick winners" by subsidising the establishment of new industries.
The reality, however, is that they've wasted far more taxpayers' money over the years by "backing losers" - propping up declining industries in defiance of technology-driven economic change.
The Coalition's attempt to prop up steaming coal - a sunset industry if ever there was - and demonise renewables may be the worst example of loser-backing since Barnaby Joyce's ancestors' fight to save the horse and buggy from the depredations of those dangerous and smelly horseless carriages.
And this from the prime minister who used to sermonise on the need for much greater innovation and agility. Which, of course, should be "technology neutral".
Yet another strand in the spaghetti diagram links the malfunctioning of the electricity market with the way we've stuffed up the eastern seaboard gas market.
Did you know that domestic gas users - particularly manufacturers, but also the gas-fired power stations we were relying on to tide us over the intermittency problem - are now paying far more for gas than are foreigners buying our exported LNG?
Beat that for a stuff-up. But, says the gas industry's own self-serving bulldust, the problem is easily solved by letting it frack all over NSW and Victoria.
Apparently, no responsibility should attach to the three big companies that built no less than six liquefaction "trains" near Gladstone to cash in on the supposed humungous gas bonanza.
How could they be expected to know that the citizens of NSW and Victoria would object to being fracked over, or even that the price of oil wouldn't stay at $100 a barrel?
Far from these firms accepting the consequences of their high-return/high-risk investment decisions, we're told that for the Turnbull government to protect manufacturers and households from the consequences of this public/private balls-up is a heinous example of "sovereign risk".
Yet another dimension of the problem is the abject failure of the whole micro-reform project of establishing a national electricity market.
We've gone from four separate state-owned power monopolies to a national market dominated by just three vertically integrated oligopolists, and all we've got to show for it is a massive real increase in prices.
This stuff-up is partly explained by the federal government's belated recognition that it must accept ultimate responsibility for any national market.
But explained much more by the state governments' preference for putting the health of their budgets ahead of the need for genuinely competitive markets, through their practice of maximising the sale price of their privatisations by including pricing power in the package.
It's not good enough, however, for economists to tell themselves their reforms would have worked fine were it not for those appalling politicians.
The reformers' mistakes were imagining they'd get vigorous competition between many firms instead of the usual non-price competition between two or three oligopolists, and imagining the regulators of a government-created market wouldn't be "captured" by the oligopolists.
Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.
