Thousands of Victorian homes still without power
Victoria's ongoing blackout is being described as one of the most significant events the network has ever experienced.
Transcript
00:00 The power court says that this is the most significant outage that the network has ever
00:07 experienced.
00:08 We're talking about outages widespread across many parts of the state.
00:13 We've heard, for example, from a council member over in Phillip Island, which is southeast
00:18 of Melbourne, and they say that they have no power there.
00:22 There are also disruptions as well to telecommunications as a result.
00:27 And this, of course, all happened due to that massive storm, which ended up knocking out
00:33 six major transmission lines.
00:35 That then tripped and led to a power surge, which ended up tripping the Loy Yang Ao A
00:42 power station.
00:43 And so that's what's caused this.
00:45 We've heard from the energy market operator, AEMO, saying that it could take days, possibly
00:50 weeks, given the huge infrastructure difficulties that you can imagine have led to this, to
00:58 actually be able to get some of this power back on.
01:02 And we heard from Bruce Mountain.
01:04 He's the director of Victoria's Energy Policy Centre, and he's explained just what this
01:08 means for Victorians.
01:10 It means that we are going to be in quite a stressful situation.
01:18 The big coal-fired generator was knocked off the system from this.
01:22 It's been restored partially.
01:24 We've seen some energy production from it last night, but not yet fully.
01:30 We expect to be relying a great deal on gas.
01:33 We've also seen the Stockyard Hill wind farm lose supply, and we've seen a number of wind
01:38 farms that have been knocked out.
01:41 Steph, what can we expect for those battling blazes?
01:43 Yes, well, thankfully, the conditions have really eased somewhat.
01:48 We had those hugely big wind gusts of up to 100 kilometres per hour yesterday, fanning
01:55 the flames, as well as really high temperatures up in the high 30s and reaching towards the
02:00 40s up in the northwest of the state.
02:04 Thankfully we've seen that cool change come through, even though it brought these huge
02:08 storms.
02:09 So we're in much milder temperatures.
02:12 We've heard from the CFA's Chief Officer, Jason Heffernan, saying that he hopes that
02:17 this better weather will mean that they really can get absolutely on top of the fires, not
02:21 just in the states west around Bellfield and the Grampians National Park, but also Newton,
02:27 which is south of Ballarat.
02:29 And so they'll be continuing to use the heavy machinery to try to bring those blazes under
02:34 control.
02:35 Obviously, it is in difficult terrain, given the fact we're talking about national parks
02:40 and also forests where some of these fires are raging.
02:44 But we spoke to Miriam Bradbury, who is a senior meteorologist, and she basically explained
02:51 what the situation is for people in Victoria as far as the weather's concerned.
02:56 Well, it is good news on that front.
02:58 We've got much more settled conditions on the way today in the wake of that front.
03:02 So cooler weather, particularly through western Victoria, we're not expecting those temperatures
03:05 to reach more than the low to mid 20s.
03:08 And also moderate winds, but they'll be southerly winds, which means they'll be drier, but they'll
03:14 also be cooler.
03:15 So we do still have high fire dangers through the Wimmera, moderate fire dangers elsewhere.
03:20 So it's telling us the risk isn't over yet, but the conditions are certainly improved
03:24 on the weather front from what they were yesterday.
03:26 [BLANK_AUDIO]