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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-02-03 Daily Xml
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ELECTRICITY, LOAD SHEDDING

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite—Leader of the Opposition) (15:15): My question is to the Premier. Why has the Premier or the Minister for Energy not taken control of the current energy crisis? In the Premier's 2002 election policy, in relation to the state's power supply, the Premier said, 'Labor will not sit back and watch the system fail', but it took four days for the Premier to convene a meeting of the Emergency Management Council.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mr Williams interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for MacKillop is defying the chair.

The Hon. P.F. CONLON (Elder—Minister for Transport, Minister for Infrastructure, Minister for Energy) (15:16): The Leader of the Opposition has suggested that we have not taken control. The truth of this matter is that South Australia has managed, in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, in a very strong way, in a way (with no disrespect to my Victorian colleagues) that is vastly superior to what has occurred in Victoria both in terms of energy and public transport.

The opposition again has been making up a lot of things—I went through some of them before—such as inventing New South Wales interconnectors and tram sales. The other thing they have been doing—they do not have the courage to say it openly—is running around the back door telling the media that we knew there was going to be load shedding, that we were told that it was going to happen, and that we did not do anything about it.

I challenge the Leader of the Opposition to provide some substance to his inventions. I challenge him to do that, because what occurred last week in the greatest heatwave, certainly in my lifetime, was that a town in Tasmania experienced a temperature which, I am advised, they have never experienced before, and it caused the Basslink interconnector to go down. No forecaster drew to our attention any risk of that because I do not think any forecaster thought there was a risk of reaching a temperature that had not been reached before. I think they now know that that can happen.

The load shedding event was nearly instantaneous; in fact, I think many people were taken by surprise when it occurred. We hope that we will not see a recurrence of such extreme temperatures in Tasmania, and we have every reason to believe that, in the near future, that is the case. I will come back to the point. What occurred was the first load shedding event, the first time since the year 2000 that supply was not sufficient to meet demand. It happened at a time when record temperatures were being experienced not simply in South Australia but also in Victoria and then, we found, in Tasmania as well.

A couple of other things occurred that we think are regrettable, and I will be talking to NEMMCO on Friday, and this will be an item at the ministerial council. It is regrettable that one generator, which I will not name at present and which in the forecasts available was listed to have 260 megawatts, was not able to generate more than 140, which also caused difficulties, when you consider that the entire lack of supply was only about 3 per cent of demand. That would have been very useful if they had actually met what they were supposed to produce. We are conducting an inquiry as to why that was not the case.

To put it in perspective, they cycled a load shedding through some residential suburbs, and I think that the maximum time any one customer was off was 45 minutes. I ask you to compare that event with what occurred on the eastern seaboard of the world's greatest superpower in 2003 when an event occurred. I believe one generator tripped, and it was not picked up by the system in sufficient time. It cascaded through the system and brought down for almost two days, I think, to a black-start condition the entire eastern seaboard of North America, Canada and the United States. People would remember the scenes of devastation and massive economic losses in New York. Despite the inventions—which is the kindest thing I can say—of the Leader of the Opposition, load shedding events are very likely to be unexpected and must be dealt with instantaneously.

What we have said to NEMMCO is that we understand that the engineering and the protection of the integrity of the grid must come first, but we believe it should review protocols, and it always will review circumstances after a major event. It should review the circumstances to make sure that the various bodies involved provide information as quickly as possible, because the difficulty, of course, is that, whenever there is a sustained heatwave, the network itself will have small, localised outages that might take a crew to identify and then get out there.

I put on the record that it is very important that people also ring ETSA. Sometimes people think that it is not helpful but, if they have an outage, they should make sure that they contact ETSA because, if it is a highly localised transformer—I note that one journalist has had a few of those not far from me in recent times—it is important that it knows about it so that it can get a crew out to fix it quickly.

The other thing that we are talking to NEMMCO about—and I come back to this bizarre invention of the Leader of the Opposition, where he says that we knew or should have known—is the planning council set up by his previous government and NEMMCO. Can I point out that I have consistently reappointed the same South Australian director to NEMMCO as has the opposition—again, it was one of those few rare things that they got right—an outstanding South Australian. Those bodies did not forecast a lack of reserve capacity. They are the experts. It would have been peculiar for us, as a government, to say, 'No, the planning council has got it wrong; NEMMCO has got it wrong. We know better.' This is just how palpable the nonsense sprouted by the Leader of the Opposition is.

The truth of the matter is that the Leader of the Opposition has been desperately thankful for a heatwave that has taken attention away from some of his own difficulties, which I will not go into, because I am much too polite a man. He is very grateful that this has taken away the attention. They do not have a media unit over there: they have a whoops unit. 'Whoops, first a press release goes out—we won.' Then, 'Whoops, we didn't win, but we are demanding a recount.' Then the next one is, 'Whoops, we can't demand a recount'—

Ms CHAPMAN: I have a point of order, Mr Speaker.

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: —'but it was a good result, anyway.'

The SPEAKER: Order! The deputy leader.

Ms CHAPMAN: Clearly, that is not relevant.

The SPEAKER: The minister is not speaking to the substance of the question.

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: Major mistake. He is a colonel by rank and a major mistake by occupation.

The SPEAKER: Order! The minister will get on with his answer.

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: Sorry, sir. The point I make to the Leader of the Opposition is that, if these matters are not foreseen by the very bodies set up to foresee them—to forecast them—how on earth is a government supposed to second-guess them? I think the load shedding in South Australia—as much as we hate it happening; it is the first in eight years in very unusual circumstances; we do not expect to see it again; I get terrified every time I say it, but we do not expect to see it again—was handled as well as it could be in all regards except for the provision of information. We certainly did not see people evacuated in ambulances from hospitals as we did in some other jurisdictions, which I think was a very surprising outcome.

I want to pay tribute to the staff in my office, with whom I was in contact on a daily basis, as well as the Premier and the staff in the department and in TransAdelaide, who I think have done an outstanding job in the last week. I was stopped in the street—which does not happen to me often—by an ordinary traveller who said that he thought TransAdelaide had been doing a very good job in the circumstances, and I echo those sentiments, although I am sure I might hear from other people who think otherwise. I think their response has been very good. On almost every occasion that services were interrupted, people were advised and, ultimately, bus services were provided. I believe they did a good job, and I think the Leader of the Opposition needs to move on to something else.

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