Allen Hicks: Unfounded criticism of renewable energy in South Australia will scare investors, hurt businesses — and kill jobs
UNFOUNDED criticism of renewable energy in South Australia over the state’s power blackout will scare investors, hurt businesses — and kill jobs, writes Allen Hicks.
- REPORT: Shedding light on how SA was left in the dark
- REPORT: Blackouts scrutiny takes puff out of SA wind farms
- ANALYSIS: facts challenge jay’s blackout spin
AS last week’s super-storm lashed South Australia, the state fell victim to not one but two major failures. The first involved electricity.
Transmission towers bent like reeds in gale-force winds. A series of safety switches were tripped that isolated South Australia from the national grid. Wind generators which had been feeding in electricity until the failure were shut down.
This would have occurred whether the state was powered by wind, coal, gas, sunlight or any other technology.
A transmission infrastructure failure has never happened on this scale before, but the system worked exactly the way it is meant to. It shut itself down to protect equipment and consumers. Had it not done so, the damage would have been immense.
The fact that SA was not plunged into days or weeks of turmoil is testament to the organisation and hard work of the thousands of men and women — from linespeople and engineers to managers, traffic controllers and truck drivers — who worked tirelessly to get South Australia back up and running.
The second failure here, while less obvious, is far more alarming. It was the complete absence of leadership at a national level.
The government threw away the natural disaster playbook, which calls for calm and compassionate leadership. With 80,000 people still in darkness, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull went on the attack against the renewable energy industry — without any realistic basis for doing so.
For a state like South Australia, where renewable projects are a major economic driver picking up the slack caused by declining manufacturing and automotive industries, these comments were dangerous. They will scare investors, hurt businesses and kill jobs.
Setting aside the technical ignorance and poor judgment implied by a decision to blame generating technologies for what was entirely a transmission and distribution infrastructure problem, the human aspect of their response was decidedly lacking.
To immediately don the gloves and start landing political punches at a time when it was not clear when electricity would be restored to those who desperately needed it was disgusting.
Mr Turnbull and Mr Frydenberg were playing to a very small audience of climate sceptics and fossil fuel enthusiasts, despite being on the national stage. They sought to do real and lasting damage to the people who work and invest in the renewable energy sector.
Had they listened to unbiased briefings from people with technical expertise, they would have known that the generation technology used would have no effect on the response of the network to transmission infrastructure failures.
They would know that in order to protect our electricity network from future events like this, we require a much greater investment in renewables than we currently have. One failsafe against catastrophic failures such as this one is distributed generation.
Where generation is linear, with large power stations feeding electricity into a grid that then distributes it to consumers, there are major pinch points that are vulnerable to natural disasters. But if we invest in significant small and medium-scale generation — solar farms, localised co-generation and battery storage for small towns and large buildings — then we are no longer so thoroughly dependent on the integrity of large-scale infrastructure for our power.
The men and women in our industry don’t want to have to mop up after blackouts caused by catastrophic storms like this. We want to be part of the permanent solution. We want to build the next-generation infrastructure so a freak storm can’t knock out power to an entire state.
We want to supply businesses and homes with the clean technology that we need to adapt if we are going to mitigate climate damage and the severe storms that accompany it.
I hope that business confidence in renewable energy is not damaged by the irresponsible actions of our leaders. I hope the people who work in the sector don’t lose their jobs because of their comments.
And I hope that the public can make it clear that while the PM and his ministers’ words might placate the friends of the fossil fuel industry within Parliament House, they are not going to play with the rest of Australia.
Allen Hicks is national secretary of the Electrical Trades Union