South Australia in blackout as renewables and transmission lines fail

If you want to know what the future holds under a Labor-Greens government, ask the South Australians.

Last weekend, Labor-run South Australia suffered its biggest blackout since 2016.

163,000 homes and businesses lost power.

Many of them won’t get reconnected to the power grid until Wednesday.

According to SA Power Networks, the weekend’s outages were worse than the 2016 blackout that left 850,000 people without power.

So, what caused the mess?

The South Australian blackout began after wild weather brought down South Australia’s power interconnector with Victoria.

At the same time, the strong winds and dark clouds rendered the state’s solar panels and wind turbines useless.

It was the perfect storm.

Without the interconnector, South Australia couldn’t import coal-fired power from the eastern states to offset the failure of their solar panels and wind turbines.

…and without solar and wind, South Australia had to rely on expensive gas.

During the worst part of the storms, up to 70 per cent of the state’s power came from gas.

Wind and solar went from producing 85 per cent of the state’s power to as little as 20 per cent.

Meanwhile, South Australia’s pathetic batteries never produced more than one per cent of the state’s power.

Our point?

This is exactly what will happen every time there’s wild weather under a power grid designed by Albanese’s Energy Minister Chris Bowen.

Think about it.

Bowen wants to build 10,000 kilometres of new transmission lines by 2030 – that’s enough to connect the Hunter Valley coal-fired power plants to South Africa.

As we saw in South Australia last weekend, these transmission lines are taken out by wild weather. They make the states dependent on each other. And they take days to fix.

Then he wants to install 60 million 500-watt panels by 2030 – i.e. over 20,000 new solar panels a day – to keep the lights on as he shuts down our coal-fired power plants.

As we saw in South Australia last weekend, solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are useless during a period of wild weather because the sun isn’t shining, the wind is blowing too strong, and batteries can’t store nearly enough power to keep the lights on.

The interesting part?

Chris Bowen and Albanese say “climate change” will make wild weather more common… and yet their solution is to transition to forms of energy generation that are useless in the wild weather they’re forecasting.

So, to Australians:

Prepare for blackouts.

Prepare for higher power prices.

Although all this is awful to admit, it’s coming.

The best thing you can do is make sure your family and friends know why it has happened and how it can be fixed.

So, add your signature to our Not Zero campaign at this link: notzero.com.au