Melbourne: 200,000 houses blacked out, 10 companies curtailed, as 1-in-5-year hot day hits, by Joanne Nova.

The State Energy Minister (Lily D’Ambrosio) said there would “absolutely” be no blackouts this morning and the rolling blackouts started 90 minutes later. Welcome to the USSAustralia where we hope to make your 150th Birthday Party 0.001 degrees cooler but we can’t predict our electricity grid for the next hour and a half. …

We were told renewables would be cheap, would save the world, and power the nation. Now we’re told the lights will go out, we shouldn’t expect to run the dishwasher or air-conditioner at 7pm every day, and burning hundreds of millions of dollars for an afternoon’s electricity is just “part of the price”. …

I have seen your future and your future is load shedding …

For forty years Australia had cheaper and more reliable energy than this, and it was powered by what four letter word?

Greens leader Richard Di ­Natale blamed an over-reliance on coal. Right on Richard.

It’s being billed as wildly extreme, but Melbourne officially peaked at 42.8C. Bob Fernley-Jones looked back at the long Melbourne Regional Office data going back to 1855, and found around 30 examples of a day of 42C or more. Days like this are a one-in-5-year-event. This is summer in Melbourne. It’s not rare and any half-competent planner would plan accordingly. …

Who will add up the electricity bill, the RERT (emergency scheme), the FCAS charges and the compensation payments?… Who will add up the lost wages, the lost opportunities, and the jobs that never came to Victoria?

Whatever the bill, we know who will pay.