South Australia Premier feels the heat after blackout

The Australian Government wants South Australia to do whatever it can to reopen a 32-year-old coal-fired power station in the wake of yet another blackout.

Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg has labelled the state’s electricity grid a basket case and blasted Labor Premier Jay Weatherill’s big renewable energy experiment.

About 40,000 Adelaide properties lost power for half an hour at the end of a 42C day on Wednesday after the Australian Energy Market Operator ordered “load shedding” when demand spiked and generation dropped.

“Labor incompetence has subjected the people of South Australia to Third World conditions,” Frydenberg said in Canberra. “It’s up to the South Australian Government to know what’s right for its state and by allowing themselves to have this very high uptake of renewables, they have invited this instability.”

Frydenberg acknowledged gridwide battery storage would help but said the technology was not well enough advanced.

Weatherill blamed the national energy market for the outages, pointing to the fact an available gas-powered generation plant wasn’t made to come online.

“The rules of the energy market are broken,” he said in a Facebook video session shortly after the blackout.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the state Government hadn’t done enough to plan for grid stability and wanted to blame everyone else for failures.