Paul Starick: Precarious nature of South Australia’s electricity supply grid exposed in widespread blackouts

The fragility of South Australia’s electricity grid has yet again been exposed. So, when the blame game finishes, what are we actually going to do about it, writes Paul Starick.

The precarious nature of South Australia’s power grid has been exposed, yet again, as reliability issues that have plagued the state for much of the past quarter-century erupted over a wild weekend.

The big question for government is – what can be done now to fix the ongoing supply and cost crisis?

It’s not a simple question. There’s plenty of blame to be apportioned for national energy market failures and politicians have been too busy fighting over climate policy to tackle power price and supply problems.

But there’s no simple solution, particularly without sinking the state further into debt by spending money that’s not there.

Premier Peter Malinauskas on November 1 announced a committee and task force to address soaring electricity and gas prices, rightly declaring “increases of this scale are completely unacceptable to the community and will have significant adverse impacts on households and businesses”.

But the task force will need extraordinary expertise and creativity to produce a simple, lasting solution to the state’s long-running electricity dilemma.

We had a statewide blackout in 2016, causing vast reputational damage.

A toppled transmission tower near Tailem Bend, South Australia, that has scuttled electricity supplies from the Victorian interconnector. Picture: Dean Martin

In late 1999, about 400,000 of the state’s 780,000 electricity customers suffered power cuts, caused by three major network failures that crippled generation capacity and forced rationing of supplies.

By 4pm on Monday, there were 212 outages across SA, affecting 26,093 customers, from a storm that hit two days beforehand.

Some will blame SA’s ongoing power crisis on the 1999 sale of the Electricity Trust of South Australia (ETSA), particularly when the privatised partial successor, SA Power Networks, is working to fix the outages.

Like it or not, reviving full state ownership of electricity generation, supply, transmission and retail is simply not going to happen.

Domestic gas reservation policies would penalise the state’s biggest company, Santos, unless supplies can be dramatically increased.

An energy price subsidy, like the 400-pound ($700) United Kingdom energy bills support scheme is offering, can last only so long when the state and nation are saddled with huge debts.

Transitioning the grid to renewable energy while retaining stable electricity supply at a reasonable price is emerging as the signature challenge of newly elected state and federal governments. As consumers, we can only hope they’re up to the task.