Politics With Michelle Grattan

As the energy crisis continues to grip Australia’s east coast with consumers told to limit their consumption and warnings of blackouts Tony Wood, director of the energy program at the Grattan Institute, speaks with Michelle Grattan about why this has happened and what can be done to fix the system. The crisis is unprecedented, Wood says. “We’ve certainly seen situations where things have got very tight[…] But this sort of extended period when we’ve had major power outages and real stress on the entire system for such a long time has never been seen before.” He says the crisis could have been minimised if past governments had worked to “address climate change” and “bring on more renewables” as well as all the technology to support a renewables industry. That being said, Wood points out there are other factors also driving the crisis. “We still would have had the weather patterns we had in the south, on the east coast of Australia, that caused all the rain and caused all the flooding of the coal mines that inte