James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's my pleasure to rise to support the Clean Energy Finance Corporation Amendment (Grid Reliability Fund) Bill 2020. I feel as a South Australian that I'm particularly qualified to talk about grid reliability and grid sustainability, frankly, given the unbelievable circumstance that unfolded in South Australia back in September 2016, where, in a First World nation like Australia, an entire state's electricity system literally collapsed. That's exactly what happened in September 2016. A weather event that put significant pressure on wind farms in the mid-north saw them exit the grid. The subsequent impact of that was, of course, a dramatic collapse in the load; the natural requirement of the Victorian interconnector to shut off from South Australia; and therefore the state blacking out for four hours—absolutely disgraceful. How did we get into that position? Because we didn't have reliability in South Australia. We saw the Northern Power Station close months earlier. We had an enormous amount of intermittent, unreliable generation in South Australia, and when that came offline the entire state collapsed.

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