WATCH: Energy Minister Shoehorns Renewables Debate Into SA Blackout Chat

Opponents to renewable energy have been trying so, so hard to find a link between the make-up of South Australia’s power sources and the fact an unprecedented outage plunged the state into darkness last night. 

Despite incontrovertible evidence showing a fair bit of the state’s energy infrastructure was quite literally knocked over by mammoth storms, naysayers have apparently co-opted the once-in-a-lifetime event to hang shit on the state’s use of renewables. 

Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg sorta seems to be one of those people. Despite espousing a policy position which supposedly calls for more renewables in Australia’s energy mix, Frydenberg appeared on The Project tonight to have another lash at SA’s power sources. 

Host Waleed Aly called him out for his stance pretty early, asking if Frydenberg believed the outages would have happened if SA used “the most powerful, dirty, big, brown coal” power stations for its energy. The minister said that, yeah, it probs would still have happened – but he continued to shoehorn his take despite that frank admission.

After calling for the states’ more ambitious renewable energy targets be reined in to match federal benchmarks, Frydenberg again conceded “they are two different issues, and let’s have that debate.” So, uh, yeah.

“I don’t understand why renewables had to be part of this conversation, at all. I just don’t get it,” Aly concluded. Watch:

We ask Minister for the Environment and Energy @JoshFrydenberg about the #SAStorms. #auspol #TheProjectTV https://t.co/pLEeO0dlIX

— #TheProjectTV (@theprojecttv) September 29, 2016

Source and photo: The Project / Twitter.