Dear Shadow Minister,

Oh bunkum.

There was certainly enough generation capacity in the system. The second gas plant at Pelican Point should have been operating and would have under government control. The only was for the government to mandate its operation is to declare a state of emergency.

What a completely warped system where the private providers are creating shortfalls in supply to boost prices. They made a killing over the last blackout.

Nationalise the bloody lot and get a national grid serving all Australians not just shareholders. But no, your lot will keep pissing about blaming renewables and avoiding any responsibility. make me sick.

A good night for the evangelists from the conservative side of SA politics I expect.

Wonder how many previous green blob voters made the decision to switch last night. All the intelligent ones of course, but probably quite a few of the brainwashed too I'll bet.

SR

What utter hogwash.

The incompetent labor government was quite happy to see Pelican Point go to the wall as a result of "free" renewables making it impossible to run profitably.

Pelican Point is a high efficiency combined cycle gas generation plant that is designed to run as base load generator not as a peak clipping generator. As such the vast amount of time and energy to start and run the plant for a few hours (given the high cost and scarcity of gas) would make this generation the most expensive generation in the country.

The claim that government control would do it better is complete crap, as the AEMO works on well established formulae that the government owned systems also use.

The reality is that the super expensive wind farms that Labor used to replace coal and gas generators provided no power and the interconnector was insufficient.

The fault lies clearly at the feet of renewables and the incompetent labor government.

It's the overall costs, if gas was cheaper then it would have been used , no? The peak was a rare spike for which there was sufficient capacity with the gas. The rare bushfires cost because idiots don't cover SA in concrete but people pay tax, rates and insurance for trees. Everyday.

The string of breakdowns started with SA blacked out because the bendy power poles couldn't take a strong wind. That and the spread of the problem to the East coast had a common thread running through it - placing the country's energy security in the hands of greedy pigs in the private sector. Unless Labor wins the coming WA election the grip of Mr Greed on power supply will spread further with the planned sale of Western Power.

EJ,

The AEMO report made clear that the renewables were still connected, but were unable to ride out the faults on the network in the way that the gas generators were able to.