The Northern Territory government's talk of a national energy summit has been branded a pre-election distraction by the Labor opposition.
Chief Minister Adam Giles has called for the summit and said that a second gas pipeline running from the NT to South Australia, and a third connecting the NT to WA, could help alleviate national energy pressures.
This comes on top of an $800 million gas pipeline currently in the works to run gas from the NT to the eastern states via Queensland.
Mr Giles also blamed SA's recent energy supply issues on an over-reliance on renewable energy, but Labor leader Michael Gunner said SA's problems were related to neither gas nor renewables.
He said that six weeks out from a tough NT election, "Adam Giles and the CLP are looking for a distraction".
"The SA state government has made it clear that the problems they're experiencing are as a result of having lost control of generation and pricing because in a small market they sold off their publicly owned power and water assets; this for me sends massive warning bells about what could happen in the Territory in a small market if we went down the same path," he said.
"Adam Giles and the CLP are hostile to renewables and I believe, if given half a sniff, would sell off the publicly-owned power-water asset."
NT Labor has announced a renewable energy target of 50 per cent by 2030, but Mr Giles says the plan will skyrocket prices by 400 per cent.
That claim comes on the back of modelling showing that to build a solar power station with enough storage capacity to supply electricity to Alice Springs for a week if it was cloudy would quadruple households' power bills.
Labor says that figure is based on current industry prices for a single project, and Mr Gunner dismissed Mr Giles' comments as "complete tosh".
"The CLP have taken one report from one situation in 2016 and extrapolated it to cover the next 14 years and the entire NT; it's clearly a stretch and what we've seen, both Australia and around the world, is technology advancement will actually lead to lower costs for Territorians," he said.
"If you want to prepare for the jobs for the future the smart way to go is into renewables."
