Around 200,000 South Australian Power customers were left without electricity after a fault overnight. Nothing to do with renewables. Nothing to see here. Except that if SA didn’t rely so heavily on renewables, these problems wouldn’t be happening — just like they didn’t used to happen.

Parts of South Australia blackout again: BHP Chief warns of jobs and investment cuts, by Joanne Nova.

It was only 200,000 “customers”, only for an hour or so in the middle of the night. But yet again the Great Green Experiment that is SA ran out of electricity.

Olympic Dam (the largest uranium deposit in the world and fourth largest copper deposit) was not operating properly for four hours. A fault at the Victorian interconnector meant 220MW of load had to “shed” — a fancy term for throwing the switch so the whole system didn’t break. SA was “islanded” — cut off from the rest of the national grid for about 3 hours, and clearly it can’t make it on its own.

Remember, this has absolutely, definitely nothing to do with the last blackout or renewables says the SA Energy Minister …

BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie was scathing:

“Olympic Dam’s latest outage shows Australia’s investability and jobs are placed in peril by the failure of policy to both reduce emissions and secure affordable, dispatchable and uninterrupted power,” he said in a statement. “The challenge to reduce emissions and grow the economy cannot fall to renewables alone.”