Arabic version: دروس انقطاع الكهرباء في جنوب أستراليا تغذّي الجدل حول الطاقة

According to ABC News, South Australia’s statewide blackout began about 4pm on September 28, 2016, disrupting electricity supply to more than 850,000 properties and about 1.7 million residents. While supply was restored over the following hours, some parts of the state were without power for more than two days.

Tom Koutsantonis, who was energy minister at the time and holds the portfolio again today, recalled being in parliament moving legislation on the National Electricity Market when the outage started. He said he heard the magnets in parliament’s doors release, causing doors to open or close, before learning the event was more serious than a brownout.

The storm that struck the state’s mid north brought tornadoes with estimated wind speeds of 190 to 260 km/h and damaged critical infrastructure, including transmission towers. A 2017 Australian Energy Market Operator report found overly sensitive protection mechanisms at some wind farms caused a significant sustained reduction in output. AEMO said the resulting generation deficit triggered a power surge on the Heywood Interconnector with Victoria, causing South Australia to become separated from the rest of the National Electricity Market.

Energy analyst Danny Price said no gas generators were running before what he described as a one-in-50-year storm, arguing thermal generation should have provided greater resilience. AEMO executive general manager of operations Michael Gatt described the outage as a cascading failure arising from a highly complex sequence of events, and said lessons from 2016 had informed industry-wide changes and risk reporting.

Debate over reliability continues a decade later. Price said the system is more dependent on intermittent generation and more fragile, while Koutsantonis said a statewide blackout could happen again but argued battery storage in the right locations can stabilise the grid, lower consumer costs and support more renewable generation.