SA’s storm of renewable liars

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Peter Martin delivers a mighty serve today on the SA blackout:

Within minutes of the blackout, Twitter was alive with comments such as: “Bring back coal to SA! – this is bloody unacceptable to have a whole state sitting around in the dark. Aren’t we a developed country?”

That one came from @rubensohn_gemma, a Sydney resident from Double Bay whose credo was “work hard to shop hard” and who, coincidentally, had signed up to Twitter as the storms hit. She wrote only about renewable energy on Twitter, as did dozens of new users who signed up that night, all of whom had a few other things in common: they used stock photos rather than real photos for headshots, they followed a Bangladeshi data entry specialist who earns a living “forum posting, content writing” and they followed the Twitter account of the eastern region of the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.

After Buzzfeed News asked the chamber about the accounts, all of them vanished. The chamber said suggestions that it was linked to their creation were “completely false”.

Other Twitter accounts were real. Chris Uhlmann is the ABC’s political editor. He suggested that night that the wind turbines had stopped turning because the wind was blowing too fast, a tweet that seems to have been since deleted.

The investigation by the Australian Energy Market Operator found that was not why the power went out. What did happen was that three of the four transmission lines bringing electricity into Adelaide from the north were cut after the pylons holding them up were blown over by the wind. Most of what was being generated by wind couldn’t get through. Several of the generators shut down to protect themselves.

Energy specialist Hugh Saddler of Pitt&Sherry thinks that if the old coal-fired stations at Port Augusta had still been operating they too would have shut down for the same reason.

The mining lobby astroturf? Never!

We can of course add Do-nothing Malcolm to the list of hysterical liars.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.