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Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham discusses whether South Australia's high renewable energy target could leave it vulnerable during extreme weather events.

Abandoned with a bullet wound in a local shop, an orphaned orangutan named Didik is just one of thousands of victims of the ecological destruction of Borneo

When International Animal Rescue (IAR) staff found Didik, he was emaciated and near death. The 18-month-old orangutan, who had been dumped at a local store in Ketapang, Indonesia, had a bullet in his shoulder and had very likely seen his mother killed by the same people who put it there.

“Our team deals with so many cases like Didik’s in which the baby has ended up as someone’s pet but the true fate of the mother remains unknown,” said Lis Key, communications manager for the IAR, adding that “orangutan mothers are very protective of their babies and wouldn’t let go of them without a fight.”

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Latest model’s 250-mile range will help ‘psychological barriers’ in drivers who fear running out of power, carmaker claims

Renault has unveiled a new electric car that it claims will overcome psychological barriers among drivers who fear running out of power between charges.

Launched on Thursday ahead of the Paris motor show, the latest Zoe model will have the longest range of any mainstream electric vehicle, the French carmaker said.

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Study finds a rise in the number of people carrying their own bags since the introduction of a 5p charge on plastic bags nearly a year ago

Shoppers in England have become much more likely to take their own bags to the high street since the introduction of a plastic bag charge nearly a year ago, a study has found.

More than nine in 10 people now often or always carry their own bags, up from seven in 10 before the 5p charge came into effect, and the public became much more supportive after it started. The number of plastic bags taken from supermarkets and big retailers in England has fallen by 85%.

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Kinloch, Skye Though the land is deserted now, the signature of human habitation is deeply imprinted upon it

High about the shoreline, looking across the Sound of Sleat, lie the remains of the township of Leitir Fura. Abandoned by their inhabitants in the early 19th century, the low stone blackhouses have been laid bare by the elements in the subsequent decades, their exoskeletons crumbling as – stone by stone – they return to the earth.

Though the land is deserted, the signature of human habitation is deeply imprinted upon it. Buildings that have entirely subsided linger as ghostly apparitions, their presence announced by changes in the pattern of vegetation: neat oblong forests of bracken, or tough reedy tussocks in tight, straight-edged formation.

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One sharp exchange between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump revealed the sharp policy differences between the two when it comes to the future of solar energy.

Baker & McKenzie has become the first law firm to join the CPLC and commit to supporting clients in advancing carbon pricing policies worldwide and sharing best practice.

29 September 1971: The Electricity Council says that electric cars are clean, silent, reliable, and make a valuable contribution to reducing pollution

Electric city cars could be in mass production and on the streets of Britain by 1973 if manufacturers and the Government gave a lead to their development, the Electricity Council said yesterday when it released details of the Enfield 8000, a vehicle capable of 40 mph and a range of 60 miles on one charge.

But both the council and Enfield, who have been given an order for 80 vehicles, admit that it is unlikely to boost the exploitation of electric cars unless the motor industry drops its obsession with the internal combustion engine.

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Ideology rules as Coalition, One Nation and Xenophon use South Australia blackout as an excuse to launch new attack on wind and solar. Turnbull and Frydenberg repeat call for Labor states to cancel "unrealistic" renewable targets.

Power is gradually returning to South Australia after wild storms blew across the state last night. So, what did cause South Australia’s blackout?

Gas users are concerned legislation to ban unconventional onshore gas development will cause gas prices to continue rising, but how big a role does gas play in Victoria?

China’s largest private investor group is developing a 2 GW solar farm in the Ningxia region which will be made up of some 6 million solar panels.

Campaigners call for reform as figures reveal taxpayers are paying more than £400,000 a year to subsidise a Saudi billionaire's farm.

Power is gradually returning to South Australia after wild storms blew across the state last night, but some areas could be offline for days.

The storm - associated with heavy rain, lightning, and severe winds - damaged transmission lines that carry electricity from power generators to people, causing a state-wide blackout.

South Australian premier Jay Weatherill told ABC radio, “the system operated as it was meant to operate”.

However senator Nick Xenophon, in calling for an independent inquiry, said “there are key questions that need to be asked”. He has also questioned whether more gas-power stations would have prevented the power failure. Deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce pointed the finger squarely at the state’s reliance on renewable energy.

So, what did cause South Australia’s blackout?

Was it because of wind or wind turbines?

Dylan McConnell, Research fellow, Melbourne Energy Institute, University of Melbourne

It has everything to do with wind - because that’s what blew over the transmission lines. But it has nothing to do with South Australia’s wind turbines. Transmission lines are large power lines that take electricity from generators to the smaller distribution lines that bring power to our homes.

South Australia’s energy generation mix is mixture of wind, gas and some solar, and as of this year, zero coal. The state is connected to the rest of eastern Australia’s electricity market through two inter-connectors, one of which is down for service.

Where the transmission lines, managed by ElectraNet, came down is south of Port Augusta. In May this year South Australia closed its last coal-power station at the port. If those coal-power stations were still operating, they still would have dropped offline and seen the cascading failure that tripped the generations. Having those thermal generators there wouldn’t have helped at all.

A lot of generation capacity was lost because of the transmission failure. Because of that there was a voltage drop, which triggered safety protection measures that tripped the Haywood inter-connector that connects South Australia with Victoria. This could have happened in any state or with any generation technology.

Roger Dargaville, Deputy Director, Energy Research Institute, University of Melbourne

These kinds of failures in the National Energy Market (NEM) which covers the five eastern states) are extremely rare. The NEM experiences a range of extreme weather on a regular occurrence and a vast majority of the time copes well.

The system contains multiple levels of redundancy and safety mechanisms, however it is impractical if not impossible to build any complex system that is completely 100% reliable. Providing additional redundancy to insure against such events would be extremely costly, and would still not completely guarantee against further extreme events.

That being said, as we find out more about the incident it may become apparent that there are weaknesses in the grid that need addressing. However it is hard to imagine how the high penetration of renewable energy in the state could be implicated in this incident.

Just under 1,000 megawatts of wind power was dispatching onto the grid at the time of the blackout with another 400 megawatts from gas plant and 300 megawatts supply from the Victorian inter-connector making up the total. Had either of the brown coal generators still been in operation the system would not have been any more resilient to this event.

Why is South Australia vulnerable?

Hugh Saddler, Honorary Associate Professor, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy, Australian National University

Wide-area blackouts like that in South Australia this week are rare, but by no means unknown. For example, between 1998 and 2012 there were no less than six major blackouts in the US, each affecting many more consumers for much longer than the South Australia blackout.

In each case damage caused by extreme weather was the primary cause, exacerbated in some cases by poor management of the unfolding event. Whether that was also the case in South Australia will undoubtedly emerge from the investigations not the event.

Regardless of that, as a generalisation the electricity supply system in South Australia is at higher risk of blackouts occurring than other areas with mature electricity grids such as Europe or North America, Victoria, New South Wales and south east Queensland. This is a simple consequence of geography and population density, not of the quality of the grid per se.

In western Europe if one transmission line is knocked out, as appears to have happened in South Australia, the dense network of nearby transmission lines is usually able to supply demand by alternative pathways without any over-loading.

By contrast, the National Electricity Market grid as a whole is widely-recognised as being amongst the most the most spread-out or “skinny” interconnected electricity grids in the world. This means that there is a much lower density of alternative transmission pathways for electricity to flow, in the event of a failure on one major line.

The consequence is that the few alternative transmission routes are more likely to become over-loaded, and then tripped out, by the automatic protection systems designed to prevent further and more severe damage to the grid as a whole.

South Australia, being at the extreme end of the grid, and north Queensland at the other end, each have a relatively small share of total NEM demand for electricity, and are particularly vulnerable. Generation on one side of the failure event is cut off from customers on the other side of the failure, and customers are blacked out. On this occasion there appears to have been plenty from windfarms operating at the time.

Of course, if there were more alternative transmission lines available, the blackout may have been avoided. Equally obviously, however, transmission lines are very expensive. Whether such redundancy should exist comes down to how much electricity consumers would be prepared to pay to further reduce the risk of another supply disruption as rare, though very severe, as occurred on Wednesday.

Was it climate change?

Andrew King, Climate extremes research fellow, University of Melbourne

The role of climate change in the storm that hit South Australia yesterday is unclear. With these types of storm systems it is much harder to see the human fingerprint than it is for heatwaves for example.

For intense rainfall events like yesterday’s you need two main ingredients: a lot of moisture in the atmosphere and a trigger, such as a deep low pressure system. We know that climate change is increasing the amount of moisture in the air, but the human influence on the frequency of the triggers is far less clear.

In general the storms that track across southern Australia are moving southwards with climate change. For very intense storms like the one that hit South Australia yesterday we don’t have enough data to make a definitive statement on how they’re changing in this region.

We can’t say that climate change was to blame for this storm without a full analysis of the event.

More to come.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Dylan McConnell has received funding from the AEMC's Consumer Advocacy Panel and Energy Consumers Australia.

Hugh Saddler is a member of the Board of the Climate Institute and Principal Consultant in the Climate Change Business Unit of Pitt & Sherry and also the Managing Director of Sustainability Advice Team

Roger Dargaville has received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

When catastrophic failures occur, people quickly demand explanations and start to point fingers. Sometimes it's best to check the data.

A predictable reaction to blackout in South Australia was that wind energy would be blamed. Who expected the ABC to lead that charge?

Many households, including Redflow's Simon Hackett, maintained power through blackout with battery storage or off grid systems. Will authorities now look seriously at micro-grids and climate resilience?

Environment officials tell parliamentary inquiry there is no modelling on how current policies will affect emissions beyond 2020, or when emissions will peak

Government officials have acknowledged that Australia’s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reductions pledged at Paris in 2015 were made without any modelling to show whether existing policies could achieve those targets.

They also admitted the government did not have any modelling revealing when Australia’s emissions would peak.

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Energy giant BP's plans for oil and gas exploration in the Great Australian Bight were put on hold for the third time yesterday by the national offshore energy regulator, NOPSEMA.

Steady winds produce a pattern on the sea’s surface like parallel furrows in a field

Researchers are still trying to unravel the complex interactions between wind, waves and currents. One of the most visible results of these interactions is Langmuir circulation, which produces a pattern on the water surface like parallel furrows in a field. These lines are known as wind streaks or windrows, and occur only in steady winds of more than 7mph.

Related: The oceans are heating up. That's a big problem on a blue planet | Bill McKibben

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