A dairy farmer is dead and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses remain without power after Victoria's destructive storms.
Authorities confirmed the death of the 50-year-old man at Mirboo North in South Gippsland on Tuesday after getting hit by debris while on a tractor as storms swept the state.
Emergency Management Commissioner Rick Nugent said the township became isolated in the storms with roads closed, and the Country Fire Authority had to help supply water.
Mirboo North has since been reconnected.
Premier Jacinta Allan said the storms inflicted significant damage statewide, with wind and trees taking down power lines and collapsing transmission towers between Melbourne and Geelong.
The disaster is one of the largest power outages in Victorian history and could take weeks to fully fix.
At its peak about 530,000 properties were left without power due to the damage from storms, strong winds and lightning.
That number had dropped to roughly 220,000 by 10.30am on Wednesday (local time), but authorities warn further progress could be slow.
Storm damage is mostly to blame for the outages and not the fallen transmission lines, Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Daniel Westerman said.
But the tower collapse did cause the shutdown of the Loy Yang A coal-fired power station, in the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland, and several wind farms.
"When the catastrophic winds destroyed the two towers in-between Melbourne and Geelong, it sent shock waves through the transmission system," he told reporters.
Loy Yang A generates about 30 percent of Victoria's power.
The station's owner, AGL, confirmed two units have returned to service as of Wednesday morning.
The others are expected to progressively come back online in the next 24 hours, it said in a statement to the stock exchange.
The network disruption pushed the spot power price in Victoria and Tasmania to its ceiling of $16,600 per megawatt-hour, hundreds of times higher than typical levels.
Dozens of schools or early learning centres across Victoria are closed on Wednesday morning because of fire warnings or power outages.
"Schools are making every effort to provide information to families as quickly as they can and where possible are providing supervision for students where they need it," an education department spokesman said.
Traffic lights were also impacted by the widespread outages, with the State Emergency Service fielding more than 3500 calls for help between 11am on Tuesday and 11am on Wednesday.
"This has been one of the largest outage events in the state's history," Energy Minister Lily D'Ambrosio wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Federal Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neill, who represents the Melbourne electorate of Hotham, said it was surprising so many homes lost power.
"There's some really important questions to ask and answer here about how it's possible that a country like Australia can lose power for 500,000 people because of a storm," she told Seven's Sunrise program on Wednesday.
"But I do think those questions are for later."
Tuesday was a scorcher for multiple states but Victoria suffered the worst, with temperatures surpassing 40C in some parts and thunderstorms sweeping the state, starting fires.
A catastrophic fire danger rating was declared for some parts of Victoria on Tuesday, the first since the deadly Black Summer blazes of 2019-20.
