From Lights Out to Leading Lights

Five years ago South Australia was plunged into a statewide blackout that put lives at risk, inflicted immense damaged our economy and made us the laughing stock of the nation.

Today South Australia has the best performing electricity grid in the nation as the Marshall Government’s energy policies have strengthened what was a fragile, unstable and highly vulnerable electricity network.

In the last term of the Labor Government, there were approximately 7 million customer hours of outages due to energy supply shortfalls.

Since the election of the Marshall Government, that number has dropped to zero.

In further good news South Australia has had no load shedding since the election of the Marshall Government, making it the only state in the country to avoid forced outages during that time.

“South Australians were let down by the former Labor Government’s chaotic energy policies that resulted in us having some of the most unreliable and expensive electricity in the world,” said Minister for Energy and Mining Dan van Holst Pellekaan.

“The Marshall Government has made over two dozen substantive interventions to get energy security back under control since coming to government.

“What makes this achievement even more extraordinary is that the Marshall Government has delivered a $303 reduction for the average household after bills went up $477 under the last two years of Labor.

“And we still have more benefits on the way for South Australian via Project EnergyConnect, the interconnector between South Australia and New South Wales.

“Work on Project EnergyConnect is scheduled to start in the near future and its time the Labor Opposition dropped its politically motivated opposition to this critical project.

“If Labor had won the last election, the interconnector and other critical interventions would not have happened, and the state would be at permanent risk of blackouts with continually increasing electricity prices.

“Having destroyed South Australia’s electricity security, it is disgraceful that State Labor continues to attack the single most important measure to end the possibility of a statewide blackout.”

“Other measures adopted by the Marshall Government to restore South Australia’s energy security include procuring world-first services from grid scale and home batteries to support the grid in disturbances.

“We have commissioned world-leading power system physics advice on how to run the grid, which has led to new operating rules to handle existing and emerging threats.

“We’ve brought in world-leading smart standards for solar, batteries, and appliances and supported key trials to make sure that consumers can be rewarded for supporting the grid.

“We’ve also secured key national reforms so that enough system security services are bought by networks, retailers are required to contract firm supplies to support customers, and large users can be rewarded for changing their demand to support the grid.”