The City of Sydney has pulled the plug on its landmark $500 million project with energy services provider Cogent Energy to develop a home-grown trigeneration energy program, blaming the federal government’s decision to lower the future carbon price, regulatory changes, inflexible electricity networks and the removal of ‘precinct’ based incentives.

“With an inability to deliver major projects on time, the city staff have done the right thing to recommend walking away from this nutty plan,” said Liberals councillor Edward Mandla.

“It's time for technologists to step up and to create real power alternatives that stack up rather than bureaucrats developing back-of-beer coaster schemes [that] only work with ridiculous incentives.