Megan, unfortunately what the AEMO media release says contradicts what the report actually says.
The 'failure' of the wind turbines to 'ride through' faults has nothing to do with the fact that they were wind turbines - the issue is that their protection settings were set to trip after a set number of ride through events. In most cases, this setting was 2 and so event 3 tripped them out. Why was it set to 2? Most likely the manufacturers settings and nobody ever asked them to be set differently (makes intuitive sense - 3 phase failures likely = transmission line failure). A massive failure of the regulator and operator (AEMO) to understand how their network worked and what would happen if a total transmission line failure occurred.
So, yes, the tripping of all the wind farms was an issue but there could just have easily been gas generators supplying via those protection settings and the same result would have occurred. Of course there is no guarantee that if the setting had been higher that the event wouldn't have caused more ride through events and the settings tripped anyway - although AEMO have even suggested that wind farms should just keep on trying to ride through events - and bad luck if these events are destroying your turbines......
AEMO also have to answer as to why, with such a storm bearing down on them, did they have the Heywood inter-connector running at such high capacity and all the spare gas generation shut down? The answer appears to be price - it was cheaper to get power from Vic than start up more local gas generation (wind was already doing it's bit and operating in the 90km/h winds). So when the transmission lines all bent over (and it's still not clear if it was this that actually tripped out heywood or the loss of the wind farms - it was the frequency not the voltage that went haywire first) then there was no capacity in the network to step up supply to try and cope with the problems - thus Heywood went down and dark she went. A market operator paying attention to security of supply and not just price would have fired up the rest of the gas plants, scaled back Heywood and when it all turned to poo might have been able to recover. But it didn't - and surprisingly doesn't mention this in the report....?
Finally, the state having gone black, the wind turbines were still there and ready to generate (albeit possibly not for long as the wind speed was increasing) but with the state gone black, ALL of the contracted black start operators (those paid large sums of money by AMEO to be ready for this situation) failed to do so. Wind turbines are not paid to be black start capable (I suspect they may not be capable of doing so) and so they couldn't come back on line until AEMO managed to organise power back from Heywood gradually across the state to the turbines and allow them to sync and start supplying. Funnily enough, AEMO won't say who their contracted black start providers are......
So whatever AEMO are saying, an alternate story might be:
1. It's not clear what caused the massive frequency variation - was it the farms going off line or the towers going down (i bet it was the towers) that took out Heywood
2. The wind farms shut down as they were designed to but in a way AEMO hadn't considered due to their failure to understand the network
3. The loss of the transmission lines/wind farms guaranteed a dark state because of the %load Heywood was running at and the lack of contingency planning by AEMO who were too busy worrying about the price of bringing on (expensive) gas alternatives
4. Total failure by the operators contracted by AEMO to provide black start capacity
All of which doomed the state to blackout as soon as transmission lines started to bite the dust and ensured that getting the power back on was a long and complicated process. The role of windfarms/renewables was incidental but nice and easy for AEMO to blame when the alternative is to investigate and admit to your own failures.