Blackouts: SA to intervene over energy

Under pressure over blackouts, SA government says it’ll take control of the state’s power supply into its own hands.

Premier Jay Weatherill and energy minister Tom Koutsantonis. Picture: Tom Huntley

The South Australian government says it will take the control of the state’s power supply into its own hands, after electricity was cut to 40,000 homes while temperatures hovered around 40 degrees just after 6.30pm last night, because the Australian Energy Market Operator ordered load shedding.

AEMO ordered “rotational load shedding” “due to lack of available generation supply in SA”, but after outrage from residents sweltering from the first day over 40 degrees for weeks, ordered SA Power Networks restore power about 45 minutes later.

The government has since blamed everyone except themselves for the state’s unreliable power supplies, which have seen at least three major blackouts since the entire state lost power during extreme storms on September 28.

Premier Jay Weatherill said SA was now on its own when it came to the national electricity market.

He accused Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his government of spending the week ridiculing the state rather than offering to be part of a solution.

“What that means here is that we have to step up and take control of our own future,” he told reporters in Adelaide.

Premier Jay Weatherill flagged the state government was planning to intervene in the market.

Some of the measures would be dramatic, including one option to completely nationalise the system, he added.

“It would involve breaking contracts and exposing us to sovereign risk and the South Australian taxpayers to extraordinary sums of money.

“It is not a preferred option.”

Energy Minister Ton Koutsantonis said AEMO could have turned on the privately-owned gas-fired Pelican Point Power Station, which would take an hour, but did not do so.

“Unfortunately I don’t have the power to compel or direct a generator on, they had the ability to direct the second unit at Pelican Point to turn on, they chose not to, for the life of me I have no idea why AEMO did that,” Mr Koutsantonis said.

“As far as they’re concerned, they think load shedding is a perfectly sensible and reasonable way to deal with lack of supply rather than turning on new generation.”

Opposition leader Steven Marshall described the government’s energy policy as “chaotic” after allowing the Northern Power Station to close last May, which was the state’s last coal-fired power station providing baseload power.

Turnbull ‘shocked’ at situation

Malcolm Turnbull said it was “shocking” for families to lose power in 41 degree heat in modern Australia and warned the state Labor government was an economic risk to Australia’s future naval ship and submarine project.

“They have literally walked mindlessly into this situation... to the point where we are spending $20 million additional back-up generators for the ship building programme at Osborne,” he told 5AA radio in Adelaide.

“The idea you can power a state or a nation solely from renewables is fanciful. You need to have backups.”

Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg labelled the state’s electricity grid a basket case and blasted Labor Premier Jay Weatherill’s big renewable energy experiment.

Labor incompetence has subjected the people of South Australia to third world conditions,” Mr Frydenberg told reporters in Canberra on Thursday. “It’s up to the South Australian government to know what’s right for its state and by allowing themselves to have this very high uptake of renewables, they have invited this instability.”

‘End the blame game’

Bill Shorten says the blackout in South Australia is “clearly not good enough” but that Australians want an end to the “blame game.”

“We have a national power grid. There’s clearly problems with it. I think what people want us to today is to deal in facts,” the Opposition Leader said.

Mr Shorten said that Mr Frydenberg needed to explain what he did to respond to the outage and explain what went wrong.

“There was talk that there was generator available to be turned on in South Australia. That decision wasn’t made. What we need to do is find out what happened. We need to make sure that the national energy grid is working properly. And we need to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

With AAP