But why did the power to all of Eyre Pen. and Port Augusta fail when there is a solar power station at Port Augusta and wind turbines on the Eyre Pen.?
Why is this so hard to understand? It's been said ad nauseam by the owners of the infrastructure and the SA government. The entire state was shutdown due to hundreds of separate protection circuits. You can't just dump a 300,000V cable on the ground and leave the state connected to wind farms and the interconnector. If the entire state been left connected when the towers went down and the interconnector not been isolated, Victoria and potentially Tasmania would have been without power too.
Once these protections trip all over the state, it takes significant time to test, isolate the faulty infrastructure, and re-energise carefully by ensuring demand and load is balanced. Do you think they just need to lift the cables off the ground with one hand and flip a big, novelty ON/OFF switch?