Coalition statements blaming the blackouts that hit South Australia last year on wind power were made despite official advice that storms were the cause

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to link last year’s blackout in South Australia to the state’s high renewable energy target was made directly against confidential public service advice.

Freedom-of-information documents reveal a senior bureaucrat at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was so concerned about the spreading of misinformation in the immediate aftermath of last September’s SA storm that she emailed officials in the Departments of Environment and Agriculture asking for help.

“Helpful if we can have some information on the cause and why the system responds as it did,” the senior bureaucrat wrote in an email time-stamped 8.31pm on Wednesday 28 September 2016. “I listened to the premier who repeatedly indicated the outage is not generation related but some are suggesting related to renewables.

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“I’m concerned that if the reason is because the system shut down to protect itself and it is not a supply issue we do no repeat misinformation.”

A teleconference was then held at 5am the next day to discuss the emergency, involving officials from the prime minister’s office, the office of the environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, and environment and energy officials.

A status report on the teleconference warned not to speculate on how the blackout happened.

“Based on preliminary information the cause of yesterday’s blackout was a cascading event,” FOI documents show, first reported by Fairfax Media. “The initial event was the loss of four major transmission lines, caused by high wind conditions.

“This was followed by the Torrens Island gas power station shutting down shortly afterwards – the biggest local power station on line at the time. This may have been caused by a lightning strike on the switchyard &/or an automatic shutdown to protect generation assets after the loss of 1000MW of generation of the Eyre peninsula.

“The two interconnectors then shut down to protect the network.

“There has been unprecedented damage to the network (ie bigger than any other event in Australia), with 20+ steel transmission towers down in the north of the State due to wind damage (between Adelaide and Port Augusta).

“The electricity network was unable to cope with such a sudden and large loss of generation at once.

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“Australian Energy Market Operator’s advice is that the generation mix (ie renewable or fossil fuel) was not to blame for yesterday’s events – it was the loss of 1000MW of power in such a short space of time as transmission lines fell over.”

Despite the advice, in three separate interviews on Thursday morning, the Nationals leader, Barnaby Joyce, argued South Australia had become too reliant on renewable energy, wind in particular, and said its lack of coal-fired baseload power had contributed to the blackout.

“With the strong reliance on wind power, there is an exceptional draw that’s then put on the network from other sources when that wind power is unable to be generated,” Joyce told ABC radio.

“And of course in the middle of a storm there’s certain areas where wind power works. It works when wind is [at] its mildest. It doesn’t work when there is no wind, it doesn’t work when there is excessive wind and it obviously wasn’t working last night because they had a blackout.”

His comments were initially contradicted by Frydenberg, who said repeatedly on the Thursday morning that the blackout was caused by the severe weather and was not linked to renewables.

Turnbull said: “What we know so far is that there was an extreme weather event that damaged a number of transmission line assets knocking over towers and lines and that was the immediate cause of the blackout.”

However, Turnbull also linked the blackout to South Australia’s use of renewable energy, calling it a “wake-up call” for state leaders who were trying to hit “completely unrealistic” renewable targets.

He said state governments needed to stop the “political gamesmanship” that had seen a state like Queensland set a 50% renewable target when renewables accounted for only 4.5% of its current energy mix.

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“What’s the pathway to achieve that? Very hard to see it. It’s a political or ideological statement,” Turnbull said. “We’ve got to recognise that energy security is the key priority and targeting lower emissions is very important but it must be consistent with energy security.”

The documents were revealed after the Australia Institute, a progressive thinktank, filed under freedom of information. Guardian Australia has a copy of the documents.

The political blame game has intensified since then. Last week, South Australia endured another blackout with an extreme heat event knocking out roughly 90,000 premises.

On Sunday, the Liberal party in three states – South Australia, Victoria and Queensland – agreed to do away with state-based renewable energy targets, lining up instead behind the Turnbull government’s push for a federal scheme.

Turnbull welcomed the move, declaring in a statement “unrealistic state-based targets” have led to “huge power bills for families and businesses and unreliable supply”.