MEDIA RELEASE
29 September 2016
Renewables opponents: more spin than a wind turbine
The Conservation Council of SA is disappointed but not surprised that some are blaming renewables for South Australia's statewide power outage yesterday.
Chief Executive Craig Wilkins said, 'We know that this outage was caused by damage to our transmission system from an unprecedented storm event that ripped out power lines. It had absolutely nothing to do with who supplies power to that system, as has been confirmed by our Premier, Federal Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg and many others.'
'However that's not to say that this event shouldn't be a wake-up call for South Australia and other states. It shows how vulnerable our energy infrastructure is to extreme weather events. And we know that events like these are only going to become more frequent as climate change progresses.
'This makes it even more disappointing for some to try and turn this into an opportunity to attack one of our most important measures for addressing climate change - a swift transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
'Some politicians and journalists started an opportunistic, ill informed attack on SA's wind farms straight away even though wind energy was providing around half of all SA's power at the time the system had to shut down, and Snowtown windfarm was the second generator to restart in the state.
'We know we need to continue our transition to a more diversified, cleaner energy supply system and if anything, speed it up.
'While we're doing that, we need to make sure that our energy infrastructure - like all our other infrastructure - is prepared for the increasing number of extreme weather events that we can expect,' Mr Wilkins concluded.