Summer is here, and so is the political spin about blackouts. This year, with a record November heatwave in Victoria and a press gallery hypersensitised to energy politics, the blame game started early — well before anything has actually gone wrong.
Tom Elliott, a 3AW broadcaster of the gut-instinct school, kicked it off in September. 'I hope we suffer from a giant, statewide blackout on a super hot day this coming summer,' he declared on his blog. A few hours in the sobering darkness, he argued, would bolster the case for building nuclear power, lifting Victoria's gas ban, and even lowering immigration.
Think tank the Australia Institute countered last month with a report pointing out that 14 percent of coal and gas fired generation failed — some from overheating — during the February 2017 heatwave.
Then last Friday, when the official opening of the Tesla battery in South Australia coincided with local power outages from overnight storms, the The Australian connected the two with the headline 'Blackouts welcome Tesla mega-battery'.
Why the preemptive fuss? Because what happens this summer may well determine the trajectory of Australia's future energy supply for many, many years.
Right now two narratives are jostling for dominance. One is Turnbull's 'energy security' frame, with the tangible example of blackouts. The other is climate change, expressed in extreme weather events like heatwaves and bushfires.
As the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) noted in its summer readiness report, both these problems peak during December to February, and they're related: 'Summer, across all of Australia except Tasmania, is the period of highest energy usage. It is also the period when this level of demand, high temperatures, and climatic events like bushfires and storms place the power system at highest stress and make it most prone to failure.'
"Like warm and cold air colliding to create a towering cumulus cloud, powerful forces are gathering for a political storm over energy policy in coming months. The spin will screech. The lies will lash our ears."
Thus the cause of any summer blackout will be open to interpretation. One side could say there wasn't enough electricity supply due to the recent closure of coal-fired power stations. The other could say climate change was the underlying driver of an unprecedented heatwave, bushfire or storm that overwhelmed the grid.
Unravelling the facts could take weeks. In the meantime, the public will make up their minds in hours or days, just as they did