PM’s comments comes as Jay Weatherill accuses Coalition of pushing anti-windfarm agenda and playing politics when thousands of households still have no power

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A political brawl has erupted over the statewide blackout in South Australia on Wednesday, with the state’s premier accusing Barnaby Joyce of exploiting the event to push his anti-windfarm agenda, and Bill Shorten accusing the government of politicising the storm.

Malcolm Turnbull has linked the blackout to the state’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 it was time to stop the “political gamesmanship” between the states that has seen Queensland set a 50% renewable target when renewables account for only 4.5% of its mix currently.

South Australia weather: the storm that shut down a state – in pictures Read more

“What’s the pathway to achieve that? Very hard to see it. It’s a political or ideological statement,” Turnbull said on Thursday.

“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.”

Turnbull has called for an overhaul of Australia’s numerous state-based renewable energy targets, saying the country needs to move to a single national target.

He has asked the federal energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, to convene a meeting with all state and territory energy ministers before he meets with state premiers.

“Let’s focus now and take this storm in South Australia ... as a real wake-up call, let’s end the ideology, focus on clear renewable target. The federal government has one as you know, 23.5% is our target.”

Bill Shorten has slammed the government’s response to the storm, saying it is “disgraceful” that conservatives are playing politics with a natural disaster.

“If they want to play the blame game, surely isn’t it appropriate to wait until all the houses have their power back on, until we know the bill, until we know what’s happened?” Shorten said.

“This is a super-storm, 80,000 lightning strikes. That didn’t happen because of the renewable energy target. That’s the weather.

“If the Greens had blamed, while a bushfire was underway, if they had talked about climate change, Barnaby Joyce would have been all over them like a rash, calling them un-Australian and all the rest of the nonsense, yet here we have the conservatives trying to play politics about renewable energy when this is a storm, it is the weather blowing over towers,” he said.

In three separate interviews on Thursday morning, the National party leader, Barnaby Joyce, argued that 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.”

South Australia weather: 80,000 people still without power in Adelaide Read more

But his comments contradicted Frydenberg, who said repeatedly on Thursday morning the blackout was caused by the severe weather and was not linked to renewables.

Turnbull had said the same thing: “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 storm tore 22 separate transmission towers from the ground and generated more than 80,000 lightning strikes across the state.

But Frydenberg said states such as South Australia, Victoria and Queensland had also been pursuing unrealistically high renewable energy targets – which was a separate issue – and it was his job to try to harmonise the state-based targets with the national target over coming years.

“In this case, this was a weather event,” Frydenberg said on ABC’s Radio National.

“[But] there is a bigger question for us to say: ‘Well, how can we prevent this going forward?’ … There are questions with renewable energy, particularly the fact it is intermittent.”

Jay Weatherill, the South Australian premier, slammed Joyce for his “ignorant” comments, saying he should not play politics when thousands of households were still without power.

“When there’s a crisis people pull out their agendas,” he told ABC. “Barnaby Joyce hates wind power so he pulls that out.

“And it is inconsistent with the remarks his own federal colleague made, so we’ve got a split in the centre of the federal government.

“I’ve been working closely with Josh Frydenberg and with the prime minister, we’re on the same page, and you’ve got essentially these ignorant remarks being made by Barnaby Joyce because he hates windfarms and he decided to play politics with the crisis.”

Weatherill said the blackout would have happened even if South Australia had its own coal-fired electricity generation.

Fran Kelly on Radio National asked: “If we had coal-fired power generation in South Australia would you have been able to switch to that? Was there enough transmission infrastructure up and running for that to have kept the state’s lights on?”

Weatherill replied: “No.”

Kelly: “So nothing would have been able to be transmitted no matter how much power was being generated in South Australia?”

Weatherill: “That’s right. See there’s a misunderstanding that there’s no baseload power. The baseload power was operating in South Australia at the time this event occurred.

“If this had happened 20 years ago when there was no renewable energy the same thing would have happened. That’s the advice we’ve received from the Australian energy market operator.

“This is a weather event, not a renewable energy event.”

Is this a new low: politicians using a natural disaster to push a fact-free agenda? | Matt Grudnoff Read more

In April Joyce promoted a new windfarm in his New England electorate to send a pro-renewable message to voters to combat his political opponent, Tony Windsor.

He said his electorate would be home to the largest windfarm in NSW, helping to broaden the local economy as part of a strategic plan.

“This and other clean energy projects proposed for the region will ensure [that] New England is a major player in the field and [will be] sending power to the New England [electorate] and beyond.”

“Clean energy is essential to meet our emissions reduction targets.”

About 90% of households in South Australia had their power restored by Thursday morning.

