South Australia Reels From The Worst Storm In 50 Years

A severe weather warning for damaging winds and heavy rain is in place for the ACT region.

“This is a catastrophic natural event which has destroyed our infrastructure”. Energy generation assets remain intact. But a more likely culprit would seem to be the state’s disastrous “clean” energy policy which has driven up electricity prices to insane levels and severely threatened the reliability and stability of the state’s grid.

The strikes, part of a cold front, mainly hit in the south-east of the state, within 300 km of Port Augusta.

Hallett wind farms, South Australia.

Well, it does, but it has to reset the system.

Arrium administrator Mark Mentha said the Whyalla steelworks was maintaining some critical operations with a generator but it did not have enough electricity for steelmaking operations, so production had halted.

Authorities have restored power to most of Adelaide and are working on getting the rest of South Australia back online.

Where does SA’s power come from?

The storm system is also expected to impact Victoria significantly as it moves into that state. This caused the entire system to shut down in order to protect itself, shutting down traffic lights, public transit, and other services in the state that’s larger in area than Texas in area. Earlier this year, in South Australia it reached an eye-watering $1400/MWh – wreaking havoc on energy-intensive local industries such as BHP.

Over 1.6 million people have been affected – to put that into perspective that’s a quarter of NZ’s population and about the same number of people who live in Auckland alone. This means that there is a unsafe shortage of reliable, baseload power capacity in times of crisis.

“The interconnector is still up and running”.

Mr Frydenberg will chair an emergency meeting of state and territory energy ministers in the next few days, saying there may be “changes that we can make to strengthen the resilience of the system”.

In the city of Port Pirie, the 185,000-tonnes-per-year lead smelter run by Nyrstar NV will be out of action for up to two weeks, the company said on Thursday.

The governor has assented to the regulations which ensures the production, distribution and supply of electricity are declared essential services, deputy premier John Rau said on Thursday night.

What about its wind power?

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“We’ve relied too much on wind”.

Did anyone else see this coming?

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Jay Weatherill, South Australia’s Premier, described the conditions as “unprecedented” and “so extreme that cyclones in Queensland have caused less damage”.

SA Power Networks said customers shouldn’t report their outages at the current time and updates will be available on its website and on its social media platforms.

Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg was also not pleased.

“When there is a crisis people pull out their agendas”, he said.

Are you in South Australia?