Grievance Debate

Power Outages

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:12): I have had a number of phone calls this morning from constituents of mine. The extreme weather event, as it has been referred to, that hit particularly areas north of Adelaide, and indeed Adelaide around the Hills, yesterday did not occur in the South-East. The weather in the South-East was not abnormal. It was a bit of a breezy day, but I think the winds got up to 30 or 40km/h, not knots, at a maximum. There was a bit of rain about, but it was not an extreme event and nothing unusual, particularly in the South-East.

What concerned my constituents was why they lost power. Why did they lose power yesterday afternoon in the first instance for an incident that occurred a couple of hundred kilometres north of Adelaide and probably more like 600 kilometres away from where they were? I understand the minister's rationale in saying that the system shuts itself down to protect itself, but it seems that there is a shutdown facility somewhere around the border, probably where the Heywood interconnector comes out of Victoria.

It seems sensible to me that maybe an isolator or a series of such isolators could be placed around the state such that we do not have the catastrophic event that we had yesterday in South Australia, where we had an incident quite remote from the major load centre, quite remote from the major generators, yet it blacked out the whole of the state. It seems an absurd way to operate the system. Further to that, I had conversations this morning with constituents who were still not reconnected.

There were parts of the South-East where there had been no infrastructure damage and no cause for blackouts occurred in that region yet, late this morning, they were still waiting to be reconnected. I spoke to one of the biggest employers in my electorate, the Kimberly-Clark paper mill, and they were hoping to restart their mill at about 3 o'clock this afternoon, so hopefully that has occurred. The afternoon shift was sent home yesterday afternoon. The night shift was contacted and told not to bother coming in, and the morning shift did not work this morning.

The economic consequences of what occurred yesterday not just to significant businesses like that but to small one and two-person businesses, mum-and-dad businesses and all sorts of businesses are quite extreme. It seems absurd to me that we have a state where the electricity grid goes from the other side of Ceduna to the other side of Mount Gambier and, if we get an incident anywhere on that grid, the whole thing falls over.

That is the first point I want to make, but this has also given us an opportunity to have some discussions about other energy policies that have occurred in South Australia. I am quite fascinated that, here in South Australia, we have an energy minister who has had to plead with the operator of Pelican Point Power Station a couple of months ago to restart it, yet nobody has had the discussion as to why that power station was mothballed.

We have had the Northern Power Station shut down by the owners, and nobody has asked the question: why was it shut down? The minister is saying we should be spending some more money to build another interconnector. We have capacity idle here in South Australia, and we are talking about spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build another interconnector to bring electricity that indeed will be generated from coal-fired sources in Victoria and New South Wales into South Australia, when we have our own coal-fired power plant shut down.

We have our own gas-fired power plant, which is quite a modern gas-fired power plant, mothballed. You have to ask yourself the question: why would that be so? I can tell you why it is so. It is because we have given preference in this state to wind generation, and to run a thermal power station you have to be on stand-by every day for that time of the day when the wind stops blowing and, most days, that is what occurs. So, when you are running a coal-fired power station at Port Augusta and the wind stops blowing, you are obliged under your operating licence to start distributing power into the network but, in the meantime, when the wind is blowing, you have to keep your boilers running.

The big lie that has been told to the South Australian people is that we are saving our carbon footprint. The reality is the reason the Northern Power Station was shut down, and the reason that Pelican Point has been mothballed, is because they are obliged to keep burning the fuel when the wind is blowing. It makes no difference to our carbon footprint because we are burning the same amount of coal. It is just they are not selling electricity and, therefore, cannot turn a profit; that is why they have been shut down.