Wind turbines are wrecking Australia’s power grid and undermining its energy security, the country’s prime minister told state energy officials Friday.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull blamed South Australia’s state government for putting too much emphasis on generating electricity from wind farms, placing the country’s power grid and energy security at risk by “distorting the national energy market.”
“This has been very much a Labor obsession, to set these heroic renewable energy targets,” Turnbull told a radio station. “They assume that they can change the composition of the energy mix and that energy security will always be there and the lights will stay on, and that has been brought into question.”
Turnbull’s government called state energy ministers to a meeting after “violent fluctuations” in the supply of wind power caused a blackout affecting 1.7 million people in South Australia in late September. The Australian state gets 41 percent of its power from wind, solar and other green sources. Australian Energy Market Operator, the country’s utility, blamed the blackout on a wind farm in Snowtown which suddenly stopped providing 200 megawatts of power, which caused the state power grid to become extremely unstable.
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