It’s been 10 years since the blackout of South Australia – could it happen again?

The 2016 South Australian blackout resulted from a storm that damaged transmission lines while the state was importing large quantities of power. Ten years on, the article asks whether similar conditions could trigger another system failure. A new interconnector (Project Energy Connect) now provides redundancy that did not exist then, though its second stage remains incomplete at the time of writing.

Where this fits

South Australia's path to a near-total renewable grid has made it dependent on interstate power flows for reliability. When weather damages local generation and transmission simultaneously, the "Swiss cheese" scenario, the state must draw on neighbours. That redundancy costs money and requires build-out of transmission that would not be needed with firm, dispatchable generation on-site. The 2016 event showed that a grid leaning on weather-dependent supply and physical interconnection is vulnerable to compound failures that coal or nuclear plant would have prevented.

What it means

Australia is betting that new transmission and interconnectors can substitute for firm power. Each blackout risk and each new redundant line represents a hidden cost of the renewables-only path: not just the panels and batteries themselves, but the overbuild of wires needed when generation is scattered and intermittent. Sovereignty compounds the problem. Australia controls neither the weather nor the supply chains for the panels, batteries and inverters that fill the reliability gap. A firm, domestic nuclear fleet would eliminate both the transmission overbuild and the dependence on weather and imports, but law prohibits it. Ten years after South Australia's blackout, the risk profile has shifted, not shrunk.