What happened in South Australia?

Climate change is driving storms like that in South Australia, says the Climate Council. However, it has been reported some are suggesting that South Australia’s commitment to renewable energy was the cause of Wednesday’s statewide blackout.

A one-in-50-year weather event hit South Australia on Wednesday, 28 September, with severe thunderstorms and damaging winds exceeding 90 km/h. Hail the size of golf balls struck the state with 80,000 lightning strikes reported. The severe storm resulted in catastrophic damage to power infrastructure, with more than 22 transmission towers taken out. As a standard safety response, the South Australian energy system was isolated from the National Electricity Market. Overnight, the Australian Energy Market Operator and Electranet worked to gradually restore power to all but 75,000 of the 900,000 South Australian homes that lost power.¹

While some federal politicians have reportedly blamed South Australia’s wind farms, its commitment to renewable energy, as well as extraordinary weather for the state’s power blackout, Electrical and Plumbing Union South Australia Secretary John Adley said: “It doesn’t matter how you generate your electricity, when 22 transmission towers blow over in an extreme weather event, the power goes off.”

Adley said that, if anything, renewable energy sources had the potential to create a more secure electricity supply system.

“When you have widespread use of distributed generation technologies like PV solar in homes, the network is actually less vulnerable to events like this, because your supply is not purely linear,” he said.

“But an event of this magnitude that was capable of tripping out the interconnector with Victoria is going to cause havoc on an electricity grid without regard to the type of technology used to generate the power.”

Dr Glenn Platt CEO of Evergen has made significant contributions to the energy sector in his role leading the Grids and Efficiency Program at CSIRO and as a leading advisor to numerous energy stakeholders. He said: “Recent debates about renewable energy in South Australia are around the effect large-scale renewable generation, in particular wind generation, is having on energy prices in the state. The effects of large-scale wind generation on electricity prices, and broader ‘macro’ issues around Australia’s electricity mix are certainly something that needs to be addressed. However, they are quite separate to the deployment of relatively small-scale household solar and battery systems, which have far less of an impact on the grid,” said Platt.

“Small-scale solar and battery systems can actually improve the reliability of power supply. Some systems currently on the market can actually provide backup power to the house if there is a blackout. Concepts like microgrids and virtual power stations, that coordinate lots of individual solar and battery installations, can actually provide support to the broader grid, improving reliability in extreme weather events.”

Whereas Martin Sevior, an Associate Professor at the School of Physics at Melbourne University, said the statement that this was “nothing to do with renewable energy” is not quite true. “South Australia’s renewable electricity facilities are located throughout a large area of the state and power from those assets must be collected and transmitted to where it is consumed,” he said.

“In addition, the tax credits used to make renewable energy competitive in SA crowded out local fossil fuel generation assets, making it necessary to instead import fossil fuel generated power from Victoria.

“Both conditions mean that the SA power network is more sensitive to disruption than without the large reliance on renewable energy. One could speculate that if large power generation capacity was located to the East of Port Augusta, the effect of the storm could simply have been the isolation of the western region of the state, leaving Adelaide and most of the population unaffected.

“I hope that there is inquiry into the incident so that we can learn how to make power networks more resilient in the future,” Sevior concluded.

The Climate Council has warned: “The storm which hit South Australia yesterday occurred in a wetter and warmer atmosphere, and it is likely that these conditions are escalating the intensity of our storms. These wetter and warmer conditions are being driven by climate change. If we don’t seek to rapidly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and limit the extent of climate change, the severity and frequency of extreme weather events will only get worse.”

Future Business Council CEO Tom Quinn said all industry sectors and regions of the country must be better prepared for increasing wild storms like the one that cut power to the state of South Australia overnight.

“Mega storms like that are becoming the new normal under climate change. Shutting down the entire grid is a not a plan for the future. We need urgent investment in a grid that is capable of withstanding increasing extreme weather whether that’s storms, floods or bushfires.”

Quinn said the top priority for the COAG meeting in coming days must be fast-tracking plans for a smart and resilient power grid that’s able to withstand the impacts of a changing climate and that is built for the reality of a 100% renewable future.

¹Climate Council fact sheet