South Australia is facing increasing scrutiny over its electricity after a “one-in-50-year” weather event caused the loss of power across the entire state, leaving it in darkness.
About 90% of households in South Australia had their power restored by Thursday morning after the mass blackout on Wednesday night, but 80,000 people in the north of Adelaide were still without power.
The federal energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, has questioned whether South Australia was too reliant on renewable energy as the state’s premier, Jay Weatherill, said no system could have coped with the major storm and cyclonic winds that lashed the state, which led to lightning strikes hitting generators, causing a surge and overloading the network’s capacity.
“The system ... operated as planned,” Weatherill said.
The storm tore 22 separate transmission towers from the ground and generated more than 80,000 lightning strikes across the state.
Map: number of people affected by power outages
The mass blackout has drawn attention to South Australia’s networks and how it supplies electricity. The state has a 40% renewable energy target.
Although Frydenberg acknowledged the cause of the blackout was the weather event, and was not linked to renewables, he questioned the state’s high targets.
“There is a bigger question for us to say well how can we prevent this going forward,” he said on Radio National on Thursday morning.
“There are questions with renewable energy, particularly the fact it is intermittent.”
Regarding South Australia’s renewable targets he said: “These are unrealistic state-based targets and my job is to try and bring the states to the table with the commonwealth.”
Independent South Australia senator Nick Xenophon has also questioned South Australia’s reliance on renewable energy, and called for an examination of the incident by the Australian Energy Market Commission.
“The best thing to do now finally power is coming back on in some parts of the state is for the energy commission to look into this,” he said.
“If we had more thermal generators at the time and less of a reliance on intermittent capacity, [we should examine] whether that would have made a difference in terms of the way it cascaded into a shutdown.”
The Climate Council attributed the wild weather to continuing erratic climate patterns from climate change. Professor Will Steffen said the storm is “a disturbing preview of what’s likely to come if Australia fails to act on climate change”.
He said the atmosphere is packing much more energy than 70 years ago, which contributes to the increasing intensity of storms and increased rainfall.
The state is continuing to prepare for more storms on Thursday with the Bureau of Meteorology forecasting further gale force winds across the state, along with heavy rainfall and flooding.
