On the question of government versus private ownership I'll note a few things (in random order):
*Electricity is fundamentally a system not a market. This point was recognised by government in Tasmania back in the 1990's when the privatisation question seriously arose - you could privatise Hydro Tas successfully so long as you sold the whole lot to one operator. Split it up and then you've got entrenched inefficiencies and that's exactly what has happened in places which went down that track.
*Hydro Tas isn't perfect but it's a reasonably efficient operator as confirmed by external reviews. To the extent that any cost reduction is possible, it thus relates primarily to the cost of capital not to operational expenditure. That is, private ownership could do it cheaper only by accepting a return on investment below the long term government bond rate. That's the inescapable reality when most costs are up front and already incurred.
*The market in Tasmania is and has always been highly focused on trade exposed industry and heat applications in competition with other fuels. That was the case a century ago and it still is today. Just because the market price has risen nationally doesn't mean it can be passed onto consumers - international factors and the cost of other fuels determine that.
*There's no lack of willingness to invest in Tasmania at present indeed there's somewhat a boom going on down there with intermittent renewables. That investors are able to avoid most of the technical and regulatory risks by going to the island state and working with HT rather than trying to compete against them is ultimately driving that.
*To be clear, the market in Tas is open should anyone wish to compete and same goes for Queensland. They will of course need to seriously sharpen their pencils - in both states they're competing in a market driven by trade exposed industry where the focus will be on overseas pricing not what some other company is doing locally.
*Snowy Hydro, Hydro Tas and the Queensland government owned electricity entities are not themselves government despite being owned by it. Snowy in particular is however an obvious and convenient target for those who wish to express frustration with the Australian government over the whole situation.
*Most players in the industry realised long ago that they needed to understand how the others work. That is, those who are privately owned realised they needed to understand how government owned companies and government itself works and thinks. Meanwhile the remaining government owned entities realised that they needed to fully understand how large privately owned businesses function and some of them took that to extremes to get the detail right. Those on both sides who failed to do so have either ended up with someone else owning them or are having an awful lot of drama because of it.
*There are plenty of contracts between parties including those with a privately owned company on one side and a government owned one on the other. Business is business no matter who the shareholders happen to be.
*There's one particular company which has managed to get pretty much everyone offside one way or another with their adversarial approach. Workers, unions, governments, equipment suppliers, rival companies, everyone really. For the others, well business is business just get on with it no need to throw stones at everyone and start a war and to be clear there are plenty of (perfectly legal) arrangements between a number of "rival" companies on commercial terms.
*To the extent there's a rather visible divide between the two big government owned hydro operators and some of the big private operators it really comes down to what the end game is.
One one side it's big pumped hydro, smaller privately owned storage schemes (hydro and battery) and privately owned renewables as the energy source for a "100% renewable" grid which in due course also replaces the direct use of other fuels, eg gas, for heating etc.
On the side other it's a combination of privately owned renewables, smaller privately owned storage schemes (hydro and battery) and an expansion of gas production and/or imports and a system that eventually uses no coal bit with significant use of gas for power and no intention of ever replacing gas for water heating etc.
Those two objectives, 100% renewables via big storage projects versus expanding the use of gas, are mutually exclusive and thus put their proponents on a direct collision course with each other. That one side is backed by two companies which are both government owned, and the other is backed by private enterprise, adds a broader ideological and political aspect to that divide.
Amidst all that there are some who are finding a way through better than others. If you're a privately owned generator and can own wind and solar, and you can sign contracts with Snowy selling to and buying from them, and you can be the retailer, well then there's still a very viable business in that so long as you can put aside any ideological thoughts about who owns what and the merits of gas. There are companies doing just that certainly.
On the whole issue more broadly, well I could have said 6 hours ago that:
1. There's no immediate crisis but there's not a lot of room left in Victoria between demand and supply.
2. Wind and solar is going to waste in Victoria and SA right at this moment.
Both would be absolutely true statements just a few hours ago but I reckon I'd have maybe 1 or 2% of the population able to grasp that without further explanation and therein lies the problem in all of this. It's a technical field which under normal circumstances would be of no real interest to most people just like they don't really care how air traffic control or the 4G network functions so long as it does.
To that end I'll simply say that yes wind and solar most certainly can work as can coal or nuclear and there's no sensible reason for the ideological battle over it all. With all technologies though it needs to be done properly and that's where the problems arise since doing it "properly" inevitably adds to the cost. End result = not done properly = fails = public thinks the idea is a dud.
To that end engineers and economists are at opposite ends of the spectrum. From an engineering perspective, inventory and co-operation are precisely what we need. From an economists perspective the former is to be avoided and the latter brings talk of literally putting people in jail. That divide, far more than any technical problem or issues of who owns things, is a barrier to progress in all of this. Remove all that and it's not overly difficult to make a power system work. Just design and build basically, nothing actually needs to be invented since it already has been.