Two billionaires, one online bet and a turning point for Australian energy

September 28, 2026 — 5:15am

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The disaster began with a low-pressure system building in the Great Australian Bight. It was a one-in-50-year event. When it tore across South Australia on September 28, 2016, it unleashed havoc that no one had anticipated.

A string of supercell thunderstorms not only dumped sheets of hail and rain; tornadoes unspooled from their vast bellies.

One carved through Wilmington, a town on the route between Adelaide and Port Augusta. It tore down gum trees and caused a farm shed to collapse. More crucially, it cut critical transmission lines and demolished five transmission towers.

Almost 20 more of these steel giants soon went down across the state. More than 80,000 lightening strikes were recorded. By around 3.50pm, South Australia was effectively isolated from the rest of the grid and out of power.

For some, the power was back up within eight hours but for others, it would take days. At the Flinders Medical Centre, a diesel back-up failed and 17 intensive care patients had to be moved. Embryos at a fertility clinic were lost and the contents of a zinc smelter at Port Pirie cooled and solidified.

Before the rain stopped falling, the blackout was fodder for Australia’s unceasing culture warfare over climate and energy policy, with Barnaby Joyce and then SA independent Senator Nick Xenophon at once blaming intermittent wind power for the blackout.

SA’s then premier, Jay Weatherill, pushed back. “For people to be saying those things without being actually appraised of all the facts demonstrates that people are using this to play politics instead of responding to what is a state emergency,” he said that night. Later he would later make the case that storms, not the state’s rapid deployment renewables caused the blackouts.

Over the following days, the disaster became something like a policy Rorschach test. Josh Frydenberg, then federal energy minister, blamed over-reliance on renewables in SA, since some wind farms had automatically shut down to protect themselves once the transmission lines went down. One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts called for all........

© Brisbane Times