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Australian energy ministers meet to combat serious power blackouts

Xinhua, October 7, 2016 Adjust font size:

Australia's energy ministers are meeting in Melbourne on Friday to discuss the issue of severe blackouts in the country.

Federal Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, called the snap meeting in response to the entire state of South Australia being left without power for up to 24 hours after a large storm swept through the state two weeks ago.

Frydenberg has held firm in his stance that the Opposition Australian Labor Party's "totally unrealistic" renewable energy targets caused instability in the grid, a sentiment echoed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

"They've set these heroic renewable energy targets and rather than planning for energy security they just treat it as an assumption," Turnbull told a local radio station on Friday.

"They are essentially political statements that have been made by Labor governments without any regard to either energy security or energy affordability."

However, the notion that renewable energy is to blame for the blackout has been widely rejected by the state energy ministers.

Mark Bailey, Queensland's Energy Minister, said the states were making up for the federal government's failure to adhere to its climate change obligations.

"The states are doing the heavy lifting on climate change and they're criticising us for it," Bailey told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from Melbourne on Friday.

"Their policy at the moment is to do nothing and in that vacuum it's the states that are moving in."

Even agreeing on an energy review will prove difficult for the ministers with most of the state representatives adamant that any review should be carried out by an independent panel rather than the federal energy regulators, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC).

"I'm not sure whether it should be the AEMC, maybe it should be someone a bit more independent of the current operations of the National Energy Market," Tom Koutsantonis, South Australia's Energy Minister, said.

Frydenberg said it was the states' obligation to provide more security for the electricity grid.

"We do need to strengthen our system. We can't see a repeat of the lights going off in South Australia or in other states," he said. Endit