George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson-Young, I think I really answered that question to your leader, Senator Di Natale, because he asked the same question. So, forgive me if I go over some of the territory that I covered in response to Senator Di Natale. First of all, it is absolutely false to say that the Prime Minister lied or misrepresented the position. The Prime Minister always acknowledged that the storm knocked out transmission lines. He acknowledged that. But he went on to observe, as is the case, that South Australia's over-reliance on intermittent energy and renewables created vulnerabilities in the system. And so it did. And let me read just a little of the report of AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator, into that event. This is what AEMO said:

The growing proportion of this type of generating plant within the generation portfolio is leading to more periods with low inertia and low available fault levels, hence a lower resilience to extreme events.

That is what AEMO said, and that supports what the Prime Minister observed as a matter of common sense—that if you create vulnerabilities then, if there is an unpredictable event such as a storm, the system will have less resilience; it will have less capacity to respond to a black swan event like the storm that knocked the physical facilities in the South Australian network. That is what caused the problem, and there is no doubt that, as AEMO found, over-reliance on intermittent energy sources was a contributing factor.