“Any loss of power, however brief, is a worry, and it’s something we would all rather avoid. People should be rightly disappointed the power grid was not up to the task today," she said. We have a 20th century energy system for a 21st century climate. Lily D'Ambrosio, energy minister Ms D'Ambrosio joined her federal Labor colleagues in laying the blame at the feet of coal generators, which suffered a series of outages on Thursday and Friday. "What happened is the extreme heat continued to remain with us, and demand continued to increase to unanticipated levels," she said. "Under that ongoing and increased stress, they were not able to continue to provide the power supply they were doing so up until then. It meant a reduction in power output from the existing generators.

Up to 200,000 Victorian housesholds lost power during the extreme heat on Friday. Credit:Eddie Jim "Essentially, most of that was as a result of failed infrastructure from our coal and gas units, in particular coal, and of course a decrease in the amount of power from those generators that did remain in our system." This emergency blackout action came after the failure of generating units at EnergyAustralia's Yallourn power station and AGL's Loy Yang A power station, both in Victoria's Latrobe Valley. Energy Australia had taken one of its generators at Yallourn offline on Thursday in order to carry out maintenance and shut down another early on Friday after it suffered a "tube leak". AGL had also shut down one of its generators at Loy Yang A on Thursday due to a 'tube leak'. While wind farms had picked up the slack early in the morning, operating at around 45 per cent capacity at 9am and providing nearly 800 megawatts to the system, they were only operating at around 25 per cent capacity by early afternoon.

Essentially, most of that was as a result of failed infrastructure from our coal and gas units, in particular coal. Lily D'Ambrosio The Australian Industry Group said Victoria's blackouts were a symptom of a national energy failure, which is leaning increasingly on businesses to fill in the gaps. Loading "Australia is not a third world country but after many years of sweating increasingly decrepit old generators and dissuading new investment through policy chaos it is hard not to conclude that parts of our national energy system belong in the third world," AI Group chief executive Innes Willox said. "Uncertainty over whether the electricity system will cope cannot be allowed to become a regular feature of the Australian economy.

"We particularly need to acknowledge the role of Alcoa’s demand reductions in keeping Victorians from blackouts on Thursday." Ms D'Ambrosio said the state had lost an "extraordinary" 1800MW of power capacity due to the outages and picked up on the warning from Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Audrey Zibelman that the ageing coal generators were like "old cars". "Those generators are ageing, they are becoming less reliable. That has become more and more obvious in the last few days. Its important we continue to build our energy supply. Renewable energy is the way of the future," Ms D'Ambrosio said. "The reality, and we need to come to terms with it, is our summers are getting longer, hotter and more extreme because of climate change. We have a 20th century energy system for a 21st century climate." Richer suburbs hit

The power was predominantly cut in what an energy analyst called "the goat cheese belt". "The power cut [was] happening in many high-income places," he said. "Presumably the choice of these suburbs was no accident. If the power was cut in poorer suburbs it would most likely affect many pensioners and those that can't afford to lose power, like those on life support." But lower income suburbs were far from immune from the rolling blackouts. Thousands of households lost power in suburbs including Pakenham, Cranbourne East and Narre Warren South. Shadow Environment Minister Mark Butler. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Coal-fired power plants to blame Federal opposition energy minister Mark Butler put the blame on the failing coal-fired power plants. "Faults at ageing coal power plants have placed extreme pressure on Victorian energy supply," Mr Butler said. "This shouldn’t surprise anyone as we’ve seen countless warnings about increasingly unreliable ageing coal plants and increasingly unreliable ageing coal plant outages have placed the system under incredible stress before." Comment has been sought from federal energy minister Angus Taylor.

Around 60,000 Victorians will have their power cut in order for AEMO to keep the grid operational during the heatwave. Credit:Bloomberg AEMO said it had asked for the power cuts - known as load shedding - "to maintain electricity supply and protect the power system as Victoria deals with record-breaking high temperatures, high demand and reduced generation availability". An energy analyst called the decision "just nightmare stuff". Ms Zibelman said a reduction in the heat towards the afternoon would allow it to restore power to the affected areas. "At this stage, we are expecting more favourable weather and supply-demand conditions mid-afternoon, reducing the need for scheduled supply interruptions into the evening, barring further major generation issues," she said.