Federal Labor has pointedly left open supporting Malcolm Turnbull's "game-changing" energy reliability package despite launching a spirited parliamentary attack over claims that household power bills would be cut by an average of $115 a year after 2020.
Sources admitted the opposition had serious criticisms of the process, including the government's inability to specify key aspects of its proposal, but said the national interest "probably dictated" that the "energy wars", must be brought to an end.
Rhetorically, the wars continued with Labor leader Bill Shorten using a visit to a solar farm near Canberra to brand it "a joke of a policy".
"This is not good economics, it's not good for climate pollution, it absolutely provides no guarantee for Australians, other than the guarantee this policy won't work," Mr Shorten said, before carrying his attack to the Parliament.
Labor environment and energy spokesman Mark Butler warned it would cause "thousands of jobs in the renewable energy industry" to be lost.
Mr Turnbull responded in kind, branding Mr Shorten a "fantasist" who simultaneously recognised that renewable energy "is getting cheaper and will continue to do so," but still wants it subsidised.
Privately however, Labor frontbenchers conceded that yet more "trench warfare" extending to the next election was counter-productive with one calling it "unconscionable".
The prospect of political bipartisanship in Canberra - a prerequisite to getting the states to agree to the new arrangements via COAG - opens the way to the investment certainty in electricity generation, the absence of which has bedevilled the sector for more than a decade.
Speaking on background, senior Labor figures confided that the government's national energy guarantee mechanism, which predicts renewables to comprise 28 to 36 per cent of generation by 2030, is inadequate to meet longer term international emissions cuts such as its aim of zero-net-emissions by 2050. But discussions within Labor have turned to the potential for the emissions reduction task to be ratcheted up within the NEG by a future Labor government.
And they say the mechanism, when stripped of its marketing, is not dramatically different from an emissions intensity scheme, which Labor originally favoured.
However Labor's support federally, could have perverse implications.
While it might positively influence Labor states, who at the moment appear hostile to any accommodation with Mr Turnbull, it could also spark suspicions within a febrile Coalition party room.
Pro-coal government MPs who approved the NEG plan on Tuesday, could yet become suspicious if they are convinced by Labor and industry experts that the scheme contains similar elements to an emissions trading scheme, including a carbon price equivalent.
Australian Energy Council chief executive Matthew Warren said because the NEG involved energy companies pricing the carbon risk, this would become in effect a carbon price.
The government's own briefing note on the plan appeared to contemplate retailers being able to buy or sell emissions intensity rights if needed.
"Some electricity retailers will not be able to meet the required emissions profile, while others will overachieve," it says. "Therefore a secondary exchange will occur between retailers to balance their portfolios."
Given the history of the Coalition's entrenched opposition to a carbon tax or anything resembling one, the suggestion that the NEG would contain such a mechanism has the potential to cause trouble for Mr Turnbull - a former advocate of carbon trading who has promised his party he would never return to such a system.
Labor's attack in Parliament also focused on the government's unsupported claim that a $2-a-week cut to electricity bills would flow.
Mr Shorten derided the assertion, noting its early price impact after 2020 was a "paltry 50?? a week".
That is set to be a key theme for Labor, irrespective of its final position, after the head of the the government's Energy Security Board, Dr Kerry Shott, told Lateline on Tuesday the predicted bill relief relied more on economic theory than specific modelling of the NEG's effects.
"What will happen when those mechanisms are put in place is that prices are likely to come down and they're likely to keep coming down [but] I don't think anybody can guarantee a price reduction about anything actually because what happens with prices depends on too many things."
