David Lewis: Whether it's powering our devices, keeping us warm, or controlling the flow of traffic, electricity is critical to our daily lives. And yet we hardly notice it's there. Until, of course, it isn't.

These days, our reliance on energy is so great that when the lights go out, tempers flare.

Tony Wood: The degree of tolerance that we have in our society for being without power today is nothing like what it was 40 or 50 years ago when people thought dining by candlelight was actually quite romantic.

David Lewis: Tony Wood is the director of the energy program at the Melbourne-based think tank, the Grattan Institute.

Why have our tolerance levels changed?

Tony Wood: I think partly it's a result of the integrated nature of our society and technology. I mean, a simple example, during that blackout, you see photographs of major intersections in the city of Adelaide with police with short torches basically directing traffic at major intersections. Now, 50 years ago those intersections wouldn't have even had traffic lights to go out. We've changed. We're dependent on power for a whole range of things that we now would say are much more essential to our lives. You know, you and me at home, probably losing electricity for four hours may not be such a big deal. Losing electricity for four hours at an airport or a hospital is a big deal.

David Lewis: And losing electricity across an entire state? Well, that's an even bigger deal. It's rare, the last time it happened was in 1964, and it's catastrophic, as South Australians discovered on the 28th of September this year. And for most it was anything but a romantic evening by candlelight.

The drama unfolds on a Wednesday afternoon as ABC Local Radio presenter Ian Henschke is on air in Adelaide.

Ian Henschke: Hello and welcome to the Drive program, and wow, what has happened in the last 10 minutes?

David Lewis: It's just after 4pm, and the station's switchboards are lighting up, and the text line is running hot.

Ian Henschke: Robin is on Port Road at the moment. Robin, what can you see and what can you hear?

Robin: There's no power and there's no traffic lights.

David Lewis: The first few callers are mainly from Adelaide and surrounding areas.

Ian Henschke: Christina is on the line as well. Christina, where are you at the moment?

Christina: I've just pulled into my driveway and I don't think I have any power because my garage door isn't opening.

David Lewis: In the city, there's mayhem, as people try to get home.

Journalist: It's a very chaotic situation at the moment. In terms of public transport, trains on the Seaford and Tonsley lines are not operating and trams are also out. Power is out at Adelaide Railway Station. Bottom-line is there will be delays, and if you don't need to travel please don't, and, above all, please, please stay safe.

David Lewis: The disruption to public transport means commuters are either stuck at work or sitting in their cars on roads that resemble parking lots.

Journalist: Police battled wind and heavy rain to herd motorists as traffic ground to a halt, and firefighters rescued others trapped inside building lifts.

David Lewis: But soon it becomes clear the blackout is much more widespread than first thought.

Ian Henschke: We are getting reports that the Fleurieu Peninsula has no power, we are being told there's no power in the Hills, there's no power in Meadows, no power in Meningie, there's no power in Elizabeth, none in Myrtle Bank, no power in Port Lincoln. The interconnector from Victoria is totally out, that's what someone is suggesting, so if that's the case we've got no power across the state.

David Lewis: Then, it's confirmed. The unthinkable has happened: all of South Australia is in the dark.

Ian Henschke: Paul Roberts has just joined us from SA Power Networks. Paul Roberts, what has happened?

Paul Roberts: We're obviously still trying to find that out, but what's happened is the whole state has been blacked out.

Ian Henschke: What a mess, Paul Roberts. What a mess. I mean, the whole state without power.

David Lewis: This is more than just an inconvenience. It's a disaster on many levels. In addition to forcing thousands of cafes, restaurants, and retailers to close, some of the state's biggest industrial consumers of power also shut down, and it costs them a lot of money.

Journalist: BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam mine is without power and closed. In Port Pirie, the situation is much worse. Nyrstar says the lead smelter's blast furnace has cooled and the contents solidified. The repairs will take two weeks, with a damage bill of up to $7 million.

David Lewis: At major hospitals, emergency generators kick in. But there's one exception. The generator at Flinders Medical Centre fails, with terrible consequences.

Journalist: Patients on life support were urgently shifted next door to the private hospital. Nurses had to hand-ventilate patients on the way.

Relative: Patients like my father, 17 critically ill patients, and they're in the most crucial part of the hospital and it doesn't have power. It's just unacceptable.

David Lewis: At a private fertility clinic inside that same facility, embryos have to be destroyed.

Back on the airwaves, there's a palpable sense of disbelief.

Ian Henschke: Someone says surely we have a backup plan in place for something like this. When will the governing bodies learn from their mistakes? It's a good question.

David Lewis: The South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill calls in with an update. He says major transmission lines and towers have been uprooted by strong winds.

Jay Weatherill: So at this stage we're still gathering information about the cause but it appears that there was a weather event which has damaged infrastructure in the Port Augusta region.

David Lewis: The premier tries to explain that the electricity system is responding to this exactly as it should: it shut itself down to prevent further damage to infrastructure.

Jay Weatherill: The system protects itself and protects the assets by essentially closing down because of the sudden surge in the system.

David Lewis: It's an explanation many callers aren't prepared to accept.

Woman: I'm so relieved. We're not to worry. The Premier's just told me that this is how the system is supposed to work. So as I'm looking down at the sun setting and getting ready to light my candles, I'll remember that and I'll be very reassured.

David Lewis: Others have their own ideas about what's happened.

Ian Henschke: Steve of Stirling has called in. You have a question for Jay Weatherill, do you, Steve?

David Lewis: This caller points the finger at South Australia's decision to close its coal-fired power plants and increase its reliance on wind farms.

Steve: I do have a question for the premier. You've spent years pursuing ridiculous green energy schemes, which has resulted in the closure of our baseload power at Port Augusta, the coal-fired power station, and now it appears we don't have power for the whole state. What a winner. Absolutely ridiculous.

Jay Weatherill: We have plenty of thermal generation, which is presently being fired up now, which will allow us to deal with this issue.

David Lewis: Suspicion initially fell on wind farms because they're known to shut down when the wind is too strong. And within two hours of the lights going out, Senator Nick Xenophon was blaming the blackout on the failure of the turbines to keep spinning.

Journalist: Independent Senator Nick Xenophon has blamed the blackout on South Australia's heavy reliance on wind energy.

Nick Xenophon: I support renewable energy, I support the renewable energy target, but it's how you achieve it and how you achieve sensible greenhouse gas reduction policies. This has not been sensible. It has been reckless. We've relied too much on wind.

David Lewis: Renewables were still in the firing line the next day. Here's South Australian Opposition Leader, Steven Marshall.

Steven Marshall: There is something wrong with the design when 1.6 million people are flung into darkness because this government hasn't got its energy policies in this state right.

David Lewis: The blackout sends federal parliamentarians running to their usual political corners. The Greens' Adam Bandt calls for an inquiry into the impact of climate change on the electricity grid. While the Coalition's Christopher Pyne, himself a South Australian, blames the left for rushing to introduce renewables to a grid that's not designed to cope with them.

Christopher Pyne: So while the left laud the fact that South Australia has 40% wind power, we are the state that's just been wiped out in terms of a blackout of our power.

David Lewis: Also speaking a day after the blackout, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the event was a wake-up call for the states and territories. This is what happens, he says, when you're driven by ideology.

Malcolm Turnbull: Now, I regret to say that a number of the state Labor governments have over the years set priorities and renewable targets that are extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic, and have paid little or no attention to energy security.

David Lewis: His comments seem to ignore the main reason there's so much wind power in South Australia.

Tony Wood: The policy that drove the 40% of electricity in South Australia coming from wind was actually a federal government policy introduced originally when John Howard was Prime Minister under a Coalition government for the Renewable Energy Target.

David Lewis: The Grattan Institute's Tony Wood says industry capitalised on the renewable energy target by building wind farms in the state with the most wind: South Australia.

Tony Wood: So I would say that if you wanted to place blame on anybody for undertaking an aggressive renewable energy target and not thinking through the consequences, that blame could just as easily be laid, if not more so, at the foot of the federal government than the state government.

David Lewis: The federal opposition leader Bill Shorten hits back at Malcolm Turnbull.

Bill Shorten: How poor form, when our fellow Australians are struggling through a massive storm and clean-up, and you've got the government in Canberra trying to play cheap politics. Really, our country deserves better than that.

David Lewis: He says the cause of the blackout is obvious.

Bill Shorten: The fact that 20 transmission towers were blown down by almost cyclonic winds is not due to a renewable energy target, it's due to the weather.

David Lewis: The political fight grows more intense by the day. At one point, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill accuses Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce of waging 'a jihad against wind farms'. That language may seem inflammatory but it shouldn't come as a surprise. The argument over South Australia's power supply had been raging long before this event. The blackout simply added fuel to the fire.

Tony Wood: Even though the results of the storm were far more dramatic and far more damaging to South Australians, the event of July was in some ways a more important long-term question.

David Lewis: The event Tony Wood's talking about is the day wholesale electricity prices in South Australia went through the roof. On a Thursday night in early July, the sun had set, so the state's solar panels weren't generating any power. And there wasn't much wind either.

Tony Wood: So the wind farms were basically producing nothing at all. In that circumstance, basically South Australia would depend upon gas and power coming from Victoria.

David Lewis: The power from Victoria is supplied through what's called an interconnector.

Tony Wood: But as it turned out the interconnector was down ironically for an upgrade to have more capacity.

David Lewis: So with no sunlight, no wind, and no power from Victoria, South Australia's only other energy option was gas.

Tony Wood: And gas fired generation has become more expensive, there's only a couple of gas generators left and one of them had already been mothballed so that created a situation where the price went very high.

David Lewis: For Tony Wood, the dramatic price spike shows just how delicate South Australia's energy mix really is. In a strange coincidence, he raises these concerns in a report published just days before the blackout.

Tony Wood: The canary has squawked, it's about time we listened.

David Lewis: So here's how the situation unravels on Wednesday the 28th of September.

At first, power is flowing freely. Wind farms are producing around 40% of the state's electricity. Another 40% is coming from Victoria, and gas is supplying the rest.

Then, a one in 50-year storm tumbles in. It brings with it torrential rain and lightning. There are reports of tornadoes forming, and of wind gusts of up to 120 kilometres per hour. The damage to critical transmission infrastructure is immense. More than 20 of the huge towers that hold up electricity wires are ripped from the ground or bent out of shape.

Journalist: Just outside the town of Melrose, these electricity pylons became one of the casualties of the storm, buckling under the pressure of gale force winds.

David Lewis: The extreme weather wreaks havoc on major transmission lines, north of Adelaide. I'm talking about those enormous, high voltage cables you might see on long drives in the countryside. The electric current running through these cables begins oscillating wildly. In the space of just 88 seconds, there's a series of shocks to the system. Nine of the state's 13 wind farms respond by switching off. The interconnector to Victoria tries to make up the difference but it too trips and shuts down. At this point, there's not enough juice to power the grid. Everything goes down.

Journalist: South Australia is in the dark tonight with power out across the state.

David Lewis: It falls to the Australian Energy Market Operator or AEMO to investigate what went wrong.

AEMO video: AEMO enables a safe, secure, and reliable energy supply in Australia…

David Lewis: It's AEMO's job to make sure there's enough power to meet demand.

AEMO video: Australia is home to the world's longest interconnected power system, stretching 5,000 kilometres from Far North Queensland to Tasmania, and west to Adelaide and Port Augusta…

David Lewis: AEMO releases its first report on the blackout a week or so after it happened. On the subject of wind farms, its initial findings are unequivocal. The turbines did not fail because of the weather.

Hugh Saddler: I think the most significant sentence in the update report in relation to the furious debate about wind power in the Australian electricity supply system is this: 'The most well known characteristic of wind power variation of output with wind strength, often termed intermittency, was not a material factor in the events of 28th September, 2016.'

David Lewis: Dr Hugh Saddler is an energy analyst with the consultancy firm Pitt & Sherry. He says there's another reason the wind farms shut down during the storm. They were protecting themselves from the turbulence on the transmission wires.

Hugh Saddler: What happens is when any piece of transmission infrastructure or a generator like a wind generator detects a fault beyond a certain limit, whether it's a drop in voltage or a drop in frequency, it disconnects and then instantly tries to reconnect, and if the fault's not there anymore, it will stay re-connected.

David Lewis: But on the night of the storm, the power surges were relentless. The wind farms tried to keep going but most of them reached their limit and switched off. Curiously, though, that limit is different for each wind farm.

Hugh Saddler: These wind farms have optional or controllable settings as to how many times they try to reconnect and there's a table in the report which lists the wind farms that disconnected and what their limit on the number of attempts was.

David Lewis: The wind farms that kept spinning through the storm had been programmed to ride through up to nine system faults. The wind farms that shut down did so after five or fewer attempts. There's now a discussion over whether the settings on those wind farms were too conservative. There's some suggestion that if they'd just kept going, the blackout may have been avoided.

Is it reasonable to have expected the wind farms to have continued operating through those voltage drops and, if so, who says?

Giles Parkinson: I think that's subject to some debate.

David Lewis: Journalist Giles Parkinson is the founder of the news website RenewEconomy.

Giles Parkinson: We do know that the wind farms did ride through a lot of that disruption. We do know that some of them, that had no limitations, kept on going. So that has to be investigated I think in future reviews.

David Lewis: Background Briefing understands wind farm operators are open to increasing the limit on their turbine protection settings and many have already taken action. But it's since emerged there was an astonishing lack of clarity between the Australian Energy Market Operator and the turbine manufacturers about this very issue.

In its second report on the blackout, AEMO admits it had no knowledge of the trip settings on individual wind farms. In other words, it couldn't predict when they would be forced to shut down.

Kobad Bhavnagri: Now, the question is did AEMO have a duty to know about those settings? If not, why not? And did the wind turbine operators have a duty to provide information on those settings for AEMO? If they did, why wasn't it done? If they didn't, why not?

David Lewis: Kobad Bhavnagri is the head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance in Australia.

Kobad Bhavnagri: So one of the big issues in this blackout was the fact AEMO did not know what the settings of those wind turbines were and hence couldn't plan for it in advance. Perhaps if they knew what the settings were, they would have managed the grid differently.

David Lewis: If AEMO did have that information, Kobad Bhavnagri says there are steps it could've taken, ahead of the storm, to make the grid less vulnerable to a blackout.

Kobad Bhavnagri: AEMO may not have allowed the grid to be powered 40% by wind and nearly 40% by the interconnector during a major storm. They may have instructed different generation types to be online to have more resilience to a severe weather event. So AEMO's sort of lack of information on the characteristics of these wind turbines was a significant factor.

David Lewis: AEMO declined Background Briefing's request for an interview and did not respond to specific questions about its management decisions on the day of the blackout.

Journalist Giles Parkinson believes AEMO's focus on wind farms is unjustified. He says their protection settings are there to prevent equipment from getting fried. So why then would you expect wind farms to keep spinning if it could lead to their destruction?

Giles Parkinson: Because if there's a big enough fault, and we saw some massive drops in voltage as those big transmission lines came down, AEMO's expectation seems to be that these machines should have kept on going regardless of any damage they might have incurred, which seems an interesting interpretation.

David Lewis: Others are suggesting a coal-fired power plant would've performed better than the wind farms.

South Australia's Opposition leader Steven Marshall says the state government should never have closed the northern power station in Port Augusta, three hours from of Adelaide.

If there was a coal-fired power plant hanging off those transmission wires that came down during the storm, do you think it too would have shut itself down to protect itself as the wind farms did or would it have kept operating?

Steven Marshall: I don't think that would have occurred, I don't think there would have been any driver for that to have occurred for a base load station like the northern power station, which is in Port Augusta.

David Lewis: Giles Parkinson rejects this idea. He says the damage to transmission infrastructure during the storm was so great, any power source, even a coal-fired generator, would've shut down.

Giles Parkinson: There is an assumption that gas and coal generators would have ridden through if it wasn't for the wind farms, but we've had the network operator, which is ElectraNet, we've had the biggest generator, which is AGL, and we've actually had AEMO in the past saying that it wouldn't have mattered which sort of generation that you had hanging off those wires, once those three wires came down it was probably too much to ask some of that machinery to go ahead.

David Lewis: Supporters of renewable energy are worried the blackout and subsequent debate has shaken the public's faith in wind power more generally. The South Australian government has leapt to the industry's defence.

Tom Koutsantonis: The important thing there is it wasn't the generation type that caused the blackout. What it was is basically some ride-through fault settings that could have been changed. The argument that the conservative commentators are making is that it's the very nature of the wind generation that caused the issue. Well, every independent report thus far has proven that to be false.

David Lewis: Tom Koutsantonis is the South Australian energy minister.

Tom Koutsantonis: People are using the storm to push their own ideological barrow, which means you don't get the solution to the problem, you don't get the fixes, and you don't fix it so it doesn't happen again because it's just politics as usual. And I think the Australian public are thoroughly fed up with it. What they want to know is why did the storm black-out a state? And how do we stop it from happening again? And can it happen anywhere else? Instead, we're in this ridiculous debate about renewable energy versus coal-fired generation, so much so that the debate has descended in South Australia to the Liberal Opposition here calling on us to start mining for coal again. These are ridiculous arguments that aren't based on what has actually occurred on the 28th September.

David Lewis: The state opposition insists it supports renewable energy but says the transition has been too fast in South Australia.

Steven Marshall says it was a mistake to close all the coal-fired power plants so soon.

Steven Marshall: We believe that the South Australian government has got the mix wrong. We believe they have had policies in place which have driven the coal-fired, cheap base load out of South Australia too early, before we were ready to make that transition.

David Lewis: The argument over wind farms has dominated discussion at the expense of other questions.

Journalist Giles Parkinson thinks the role of the Australian Energy Market Operator should be more heavily scrutinised. He says many in the renewable energy sector believe AEMO is using the debate about trip settings on wind farms to distract from its own shortcomings.

Giles Parkinson: Well, AEMO has not really investigated its own role and if it has it probably shouldn't be investigating its own role, so it has basically left the wind industry hung out to dry, leaving enough inference in there for people who do not favour wind to find it guilty and write and declare all sorts of things about the wind industry and the weakness of wind energy. And I think people are quite confused about what the market operator seems to be doing and I think some people think it's more interested in protecting its own reputation at this stage than getting to the bottom of it.

David Lewis: So what could AEMO have done differently? Well, for one thing, it didn't seem to think the massive storm on the horizon would damage transmission infrastructure, and it decided not to declare a so-called 'credible contingency'.

Giles Parkinson: It says it saw no reason to call a credible contingency, in other words it saw no risk to the transmission or the generation assets despite the fact this storm was approaching and it was packing wind speeds well beyond the stated limits of many of the wind farms that were operating at the time. So I think that needs to be reviewed and I think it probably needs to be reviewed by an institution that's not AEMO itself.

David Lewis: Two weeks ago, at an energy forum, David Swift from the executive team appears to have conceded that AEMO made the wrong call. He's quoted as saying: 'In hindsight, one doesn't know whether that was maybe the best answer.'

Had AEMO instead declared a credible contingency, it could have intervened to make the electricity grid more resilient in severe weather conditions. Take the interconnector to Victoria, for example. That was running almost at capacity before the storm hit, so if anything were to go wrong with the wind farms or gas generators that afternoon, the interconnector was already vulnerable to overloading and shutting down.

David Leitch is from the electricity consultancy firm ITK.

David Leitch: The Heywood interconnector could have been de-rated an hour earlier so that when the wind generation went off, the Heywood generator could have picked up more electricity from Victoria and put it in and that probably would have helped a lot.

David Lewis: Giles Parkinson agrees AEMO should have taken the pressure off the interconnector.

Giles Parkinson: It was basically running the interconnector, not at full throttle but pretty close to full throttle, so it basically gave itself no margin for error. It's a bit like the reserve bank, when it plays with the levers of the economy, and the reserve bank has pushed the interest rates down towards zero and it really has little room to move, and that's where the energy market operator found itself. It basically had no backup and no contingency plans. Look, at least in retrospect it was a remarkably brave and possibly foolhardy decision to make.

David Lewis: South Australia's energy minister Tom Koutsantonis is more sympathetic to AEMO. He says the market operator could have breached its own rules by placing restrictions on the interconnector, without having earlier declared the storm to be a credible threat to the power network.

Tom Koutsantonis: Well, they would have had to have acted in a way that perhaps would have supported some operators in the market over others, it may have exposed them for a form of legal action. They may have thought to themselves that they have enough protection within the market to do so. My view is that the market operator's responsibility first and foremost is to keep the lights on, and if they needed to constrain the interconnector they should have done so, but that doesn't mean they have the tools to do so.

David Lewis: Tom Koutsantonis says this shows the rules governing AEMO have to change to give it more decision-making power during severe weather events.

Tom Koutsantonis: So while everyone's quick to point the finger of blame, I think we've reached a point now where the market rules, the market operation really wasn't sufficiently robust to deal with a major natural disaster once infrastructure started failing.

David Lewis: The interconnector to Victoria was in high demand when the storm hit for this reason: it was providing cheap power. But what's more important during a major storm; following the rules of market economics or keeping the lights on? Tom Koutsantonis believes AEMO has its priorities wrong.

Tom Koutsantonis: I think we need to start looking at interconnectors rather than being a market tool or even behaving as a generator, should be there simply as a security measure to make sure there's enough generation in every state operating to give it everything it needs.

David Lewis: If ever there was an opportunity for reform, it's now.

Australia's chief scientist Dr Alan Finkel has been appointed to review not just the South Australian blackout and AEMO's actions during the fiasco, but also the entire national electricity market.

As well as contemplating rule changes, he'll be looking at ways to make the grid more resilient as more renewable power is added to the mix. There are many different solutions. But Dr Finkel may take inspiration from this man, semi-retired engineer, Keith Bladon.

Keith Bladon: When the grid failed I was in a big shopping centre on the other side of the city, waiting to get petrol, and of course the pumps died and they didn't have any petrol, so that was a bit of a zoo coming home, but when I got home it was sort of the only place that had lights on and everything was fine once I got home.

David Lewis: You heard him correctly. 1.7 million people were without power on the 28th of September, but not Keith Bladon.

Was that a point of curiosity for your neighbours? Was anyone looking at your house and wondering why hasn't he been taken out?

Keith Bladon: I don't know. Nobody said anything.

David Lewis: Frustrated with the high price of electricity in South Australia and also wanting to reduce his environmental footprint, Keith installed solar panels at his bush property near Adelaide. He also bought a battery so he could store power in case of a blackout.

So what did you do during those hours at home? Did you just live your life as normal?

Keith Bladon: Yep, cooked dinner. Watched TV. Had the heater going. Went to bed. The usual stuff.

David Lewis: Did you feel a little pang of guilt at all, knowing what the rest of the state was enduring?

Keith Bladon: No, because I spent the money, so I didn't feel at all guilty for having the resources.

David Lewis: Keith rode through the power outage comfortably but he doesn't see himself as the poster boy for energy security. He spent a lot of money to prepare for such an event. Not everyone can afford to do that. Nor should they be expected to, Keith says.

Do you feel as though what you've done could present a solution to energy security for South Australians?

Keith Bladon: Well… I wouldn't like to see and I don't think it's fair or reasonable that the general public should be put in a position where they have to do their own thing because the infrastructure isn't up to par.

David Lewis: Keith says battery technology is improving so fast that it could soon store power not just for his house but for his entire suburb, perhaps even all of Adelaide.

Keith Bladon: Tesla is looking at substation level battery storage and that sort of thing to help soften their renewables peak supply and that sort of issue. I think that the industrial grid level scale options are still…commercially viable ones are still a ways away.

David Lewis: Still, it's nice to think that, one day, when another damaging storm rolls through, we might all find ourselves sitting in our living room, enjoying a hot meal, watching a movie or reading a book, blissfully oblivious to it all.

Background Briefing's co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinness, the series producer is Tim Roxburgh, technical production this week by Andrei Shabunov, our executive producer is Wendy Carlisle. I'm David Lewis. Thanks for listening.