"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," the Prime Minister said.

And that was the explanation too from South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill. There are all sorts of technical complications beyond that which go beyond the expertise of Canberra Observed about the role of interconnectors, the vulnerability to the system caused by the fact so much of SA's renewable power comes from the storm-hit north, and how long it takes to crank up gas-fired baseload power stations. Thank goodness the energy regulator will be able to look at all these issues in its review.

But context is everything in politics and the political problem – and potentially the huge opportunity – that flows from this event goes to South Australia's approach to renewable energy, even if it was not the actual cause of the incident.

Reliability of energy supply

The episode in July this year when energy prices spiked sharply – because a state that boasts a 40 per cent reliance on renewable energy suddenly found itself experiencing a few cloudy, windless days – set the framework for thinking about the reliability of energy supply, and the market signals that currently exist, before Wednesday's events. It made the questions about renewable energy inevitable this week.

Cartoon by David Rowe.

And it is this issue of energy security that Frydenberg and Turnbull zeroed in on, rather than renewable energy per se, in their responses to the South Australian storm.

"There is no doubt that a heavy reliance on intermittent renewals, by which in South Australia we're mostly talking about wind [though] there's also solar, does place very different strains and pressures on a grid, than reliance on traditional base load power", Turnbull said.


"Now I want to make this point – energy security should always be the key priority. If you are stuck in an elevator, if the lights won't go on, if everything in your fridge is thawing out because the power has gone, you are not going to be concerned about the particular source of that power – whether it is hydro, wind, solar, coal or gas. You want to know that the energy is secure. Now, that has to be the key priority."

This is the heart of the politics of what happened in South Australia on Wednesday: it is not that renewable energy was the cause of the power outage, but that it has been a rude wake-up call to people that energy security – or maybe just call it certainty – really is something most people take for granted.

A Himawari-8 satellite image showing the storm near South Australia on Wednesday. Supplied

It was interesting that the response of business groups such as the Australian Industry Group and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry went to the need to ensure businesses got power, not to the question of where that power came from, or how it was generated.

If anything, the fact that climate change is going to produce a lot more extreme weather events only increases the need to understand how our national energy grid works and how vulnerable it is to episodes like the one we have seen this week.

That will inevitably mean understanding not just generation and transmission systems, but the prices that drive their development. And it means getting serious about issues such as storage.

Energy security issue not a new one

That means looking at not just the level of the renewable energy target but its structure. It may well be that, if you are looking at the RET in the light of this episode, in the context of energy security, and in the context or rapidly changing technology, it may actually produce a much better investment environment for renewable energy.


It doesn't necessarily end up with a less ambitious national renewable energy target, but it probably does mean you have to look at whether the plethora of different state targets is creating distortions in the market.

The issue of energy security is not a new one for the energy cognoscenti, but it potentially provides a much less hysterical platform to discuss energy policy – everything from climate change to energy pricing systems – than one that simply links climate change to renewables.

Unfortunately, the prime minister's remarks on Thursday that "a number of the state Labor governments" had set renewable targets that are "extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic, and have paid little or no attention to energy security", and which were little more than "a political or ideological statement", hasn't helped the cause of dragging the debate back to more sensible territory

On social media, the outrage poured out on Thursday: the disappointing prime minister had made the final transition to being a climate change denying right-wing nut job because he was calling on state governments to abandon "ideological and unrealistic" renewable energy aims.

But the entrails of the prime minister's message isn't against renewable power but about what is becoming a dysfunctional mishmash of policies after a period in which the national renewable target has been heading south and states have been heading north.

In fact, while it will require dancing on the head of a political pin, this event offers the opportunity to a prime minister with dented climate change credentials to actually rework a renewable energy target which might otherwise be too difficult to touch, but which probably could do with an overhaul given rapidly changing technology. Whether there is either the room, or the skill, for our leaders to achieve this in the middle of the storm is hard to say.

Laura Tingle is The Australian Financial Review's political editor.