“It is about time that Chris Kenny was pilloried for distorting the truth on renewable energy (The Australian August 12),” Dr John Iser wrote in a Letter to the Editor submitted to the Australian which we understand was not published.

Dr Iser added: 

“Kenny has joined the many commentators who continue to place the primary blame for the outage in South Australia in September 2016 on the inadequacy of wind turbines as a technology. In its final report, AEMO states clearly that many of the wind farms “have a protection feature that takes action if the number of ride-through events in a specified period exceeds a pre-set limit.” 

Again, “AEMO was unaware of this protection feature before the Black System event.” And yet again, “Performance with respect to fault ride-through capability is generally assessed based on recorded network fault event analysis. No previous examples of repeated fault ride-through issues with wind farms have been reported to AEMO. Additionally, AEMO is not aware of any reported instances of this phenomenon internationally.” 

Certainly, the wind-farms were unable to respond because of their inappropriate settings for such a severe insult, but since then, AEMO has full knowledge of the adjusted settings and an outage is most unlikely to recur even in another extreme weather event. 

Instead of a continual barrage against renewables it would be preferable to encourage their uptake as a contribution to the reduction of climate change and future extreme weather events.”

Dr John Iser is the Victorian Chair of DEA