South Australian blackout 'nothing to do with renewable energy': experts

Malcolm Turnbull - stirring
up a political storm over
renewable energy.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has put Australia's renewable energy mix up for discussion as a political storm unleashed by the blackout in South Australia forced experts to insist the statewide electricity failure had "absolutely nothing" to do with that state's heavy reliance on wind power.

Energy market analysts compared the once-in-50-years storm that lashed SA on Wednesday night to a 2003 incident in the US when a single tree branch touching an overloaded power line turned the lights off for 50 million people in the US and Canada.

The cascading electricity outages that resulted plunged them into darkness and became the biggest blackout in North American history but the official investigation stressed that the mother of all blackouts had been a "grid issue" not a lack of baseload power generation capacity.

As politicians, including Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and high-profile South Australian crossbencher Nick Xenophon used Wednesday's blackout to call into question the move to renewables, energy market experts dismissed any causal link to wind energy.

Read Heath Aston’s story in the Melbourne Age - “South Australian blackout 'nothing to do with renewable energy': experts.”