Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has attacked SA Premier Jay Weatherill, saying the state’s renewable energy policy has failed

EXCLUSIVE: A lazy, complacent and hypocritical State Government has left South Australia dependent on dirty coal and without an electricity safety net, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says.

• MAIN REPORT: ‘Dramatic’ overhaul to stop blackouts
• RESPONSE How the State Government plans to fix energy crisis
• HIT LIST: Is your area on the blackout hit list?
• ANALYSIS: No easy fix to SA’s power crisis
• YOUR REACTION: People angry and frustrated by power cuts

A LAZY, complacent and hypocritical State Government has left South Australia dependent on dirty coal and without an electricity safety net, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says.

In a stinging attack on Premier Jay Weatherill, Mr Turnbull said SA’s renewable energy policy had opened it up to unacceptable risk.

Mr Turnbull spoke exclusively to The Advertiser in Canberra on Thursday after a day dedicated to debate about energy security.

He said Mr Weatherill had “boasted” about the high level of wind power in SA.

“The absurdity, the irony of this is it means SA is relying more and more heavily on Victoria, on the interconnector... and the energy they’re importing from Victoria is generated by brown coal power stations in the Latrobe Valley, which are the most emissions-intense,” he said.

Malcolm Turnbull said SA is at fault for not having a safety net with baseload power or better storage.

“They have a higher emissions intensity than the Northern Power Station did that has been closed down. And of course much, much higher – three times the emissions intensity – of a gas-fired power station.

“If you want to have a larger and larger share of intermittent renewables in your energy system, then you need to have the backup... to step in when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

“What Weatherill has done in a very lazy and complacent way is just assume you can draw more and more energy from Victoria.”

He said it was “totally, completely... completely hypocritical” for SA to be proud of its renewables when it was drawing on dirty interstate power and forcing people to rely on diesel-fuelled generators.

“Not only is it hypocritical because you’ve got businesses and households running diesel-fuelled generators, which obviously emit a lot of CO2, but you’re sucking more and more brown coal energy out of Victoria,” he said.

“The level of dependence and hence risk and unreliability that (Mr Weatherill) has created is the consequence of this mindless wander off into renewables.”

In Question Time on Thursday, almost all questions to the Government led to answers about energy and SA’s situation. At one point, Treasurer Scott Morrison brandished a lump of coal as he talked about Labor’s “fear” of coal.

The coal was passed around the Coalition frontbenchers, with some fondling it while others, including senior SA Liberal Christopher Pyne, declined the opportunity.

The State Government has laid the blame for the load-shedding blackouts firmly at the feet of the Australian Energy Market Operator and Mr Weatherill says SA will “intervene dramatically” in the market to fix the situation.

“We have to step up and take control of our own future, and we are determined to do that,” he said.

“South Australians are not prepared to put up with being ridiculed and having the finger pointed at them by a Federal Government that has abdicated its responsibilities.”

Mr Turnbull said SA was at fault for not having a safety net in the form of baseload power or better storage.

He said pumped hydro – where water is pumped up to a high reservoir when power is plentiful and cheap then released to create energy when power is expensive – was the “big opportunity” for SA.

But in the immediate future, SA would need a combination of energy sources, including gas, to prevent more blackouts, he said.

When asked what he thought about the Liberal state Opposition’s moratorium on fracking in the South East, he said: “The consequence of constraining the supply of gas is that you’ll have higher and higher gas prices.”