COAL-FIRED power plants that demand too high a price to shut down under a planned government buyout should be stripped of their share in $5.5 billion in carbon tax compensation, green groups say.
The call comes amid a growing belief that negotiations to shut down 2000 megawatts of dirty coal-fired electricity - a key part of the government's Clean Energy Future scheme - are foundering.
The contract-for-closure program, under which five major power stations would be paid billions of dollars to close down between 2016 and 2020, is already more than two months past the original deadline.
It is believed that the owners of the power plants - Playford B in South Australia, Collinsville in Queensland, and Energy Brix, Hazelwood and Yallourn in Victoria - argue their assets are worth more than the federal government is prepared to pay to buy them out.
This week, Victorian Energy Minister Michael O'Brien said it was ''pretty common knowledge that where the Commonwealth saw the appropriate level of compensation being seemed to be in a very different space to where those companies putting their hands up saw the level of compensation as being''.
Factors such as the rising gas price and the scrapping of the government's carbon floor price may have altered the perceived price tag on the coal plants.
The carbon price is supposed to make dirty coal plants economically unviable. Green groups are now saying that if the owners of the plants believe they are still valuable, they should not be given hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon tax cash compensation and millions more in free carbon permits - payments that come under a stream of funding called the Energy Security Fund.
Mark Wakeham, of Environment Victoria, said: ''If these facilities now claim they have a profitable future and their asset values remain high, then there is no public policy justification for the compensation payments that are coming at great cost to Australian taxpayers.''
Under the Energy Security Fund, the five plants have together been paid about $590 million. None of the plant owners would comment.
