No, Aidan, you are wrong as usual. They had to RESTART the ONLY gas fired facility at Pelican Point, which was idle and not maintained properly, hence, some parts of SA are still without power. Get your facts right or belt up.

JayB,

The SA government is, of course, Labor, in the grip of the Green menace. But, yes, the opposition would probably do the same. The opposition leader is also an idiot, without the outhouse rat cunning and sleaze of the premier, Wetherill.

Jayb,

If you had read either of my posts (which you clearly haven't) you would realize how irrelevant and silly your posts were.

As I mentioned above, the priority that ranks above anything is reliability. The black out cost the state from what I read upwards of $2bn, roughly 4x what a second connector was going to cost.

The basic thing about electrical networks is that transmission lines and cables fail for a variety of reasons. Insulators break, wind causes the lines to clash, lightning creates a surge etc, etc. All the major networks in NSW have built in redundancy and can lose one or more lines without interrupting power. So while the towers collapsing was the cause of the outage, that it did was a huge cock up.

The original network in the 80s had no connection to Victoria, and had in built redundancy. The interconnector provided addition supply and redundancy allowing for additional factories etc to be built. Recently, the highly reliable base load coal supplies have been shut down to be replaced by unreliable renewable power supplies and the redundancy and stability have been whittled away.

So while renewables didn't directly cause the blackout, if money had been spent where it should have on the interconnection rather on renewables, then SA would not have had a complete shut down courtesy of Labor.

ttbn, before you dismiss me as "wrong as usual" and go shooting your mouth off, you should try getting your information from sources other than the Murdoch Press!

Pelican Point is SA's ONLY gas fired power station... APART FROM those at:

• Mintaro
• Hallett
• Dry Creek
• Ladbroke Grove (near Penola)
• Osborne
• Torrens Island (three different ones)

There are also several that run on diesel, though due to the higher fuel cost they're only used infrequently.

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Shadow,

In the pre-Keating era, everything was state owned and there was plenty of redundancy as governments built things in anticipation of future needs. But then there was a change of ethos, and infrastructure owners were encouraged to sweat their assets. Then under Howard there was more pressure to privatise, especially as after Victoria had built powerless to near the SA border, SA took the opportunity to link up the grids. But privatisation created new problems, as shareholders and customers often have conflicting objectives.

Many SA people despise the state Liberals for the problems that electricity privatisation caused, but have almost as much animosity towards the state Labor party. Still, trying to lay the blame with a political party is at best futile.

[sorry about the autocorrect error: where it says "powerless" it should be "powerlines"]

Aidan,

I live in Adelaide, and know where the power comes from. I don't have to rely on Murdoch or any other totally wrong source, as you do. You proved your weakness long ago with your 'sovereign borrowing' crap. You believe any bulldust you read or hear because you have no personal knowledge of anything. You are just another left wing twit who doesn't know his backside from his elbow.

PS, Aidan (not that it sill sink in) the piddling little extra stations you mention are separately owned, and their COMBINED output is well below demand, and Pelican Point was taken offline 12 months ago.