Why is it important that something is done quickly? As I understand from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout it was caused by once-in-50-year event. I understand political urgency, but technically there doesn't seem to be anything urgent.

Firstly, I guess some of the urgency comes down to whether or not you think climate change is real and that it needs to be acted upon with some urgency.

As to the cause of the outage it is not quite as simple as that.

The SA government certainly believes in climate change since they decided to move away from coal and now get most of their energy from renewables.

But because of this, they got blamed for the blackouts by the opposition parties, who put the blackout down to the mad rush into renewables.

Now there is an election coming up next year, so I have no doubt the opposition would have used that same argument during that election.

But where I think this might backfired and why I think the SA Premier has come up with a master stroke, is come this December SA will have it's battery and in part because of climate change, it will be stinking hot all over Australia.

So if the SA battery works as designed and helps to keep all the SA air conditioners running at maximum, it will be a very big win for the SA Government.

Unfortunately, 1 in 50 year events seem to be happening more and more frequently.

And as yesterday's discussion on this pointed out, it's more about mitigating political risk; if there are any power outages in the next few months then the current state government is toast.

Virtually no voter appreciates the technical lack of urgency. One large voting bloc would be thinking "Labor has dropped the ball on electricity and must be removed!" and another would excuse a project like this as at least heading in the right direction.

(I'm South Australian.)

"Once in 50 year event" means that there's a 2% chance of it happening on any given year, not that it happens only once every 50 years.