Severe storms and thousands of lightning strikes knocked out power to the entire state of South Australia yesterday, leading to port closures and commuter chaos.
Today is set to bring more severe conditions, with heavy rain and destructive winds to lash large parts of the state.
An intense lower pressure system would continue to move across the state after super cell thunderstorms brought down the entire power network.
The winds ripped at least 22 transmission towers from the ground across the mid-north with about 80,000 lightning strikes hitting the state, some damaging generation facilities.
South Australia is the country's fifth most populous state, with 1.7 million people and Adelaide as its capital, and is a major wine producer and traditional manufacturing hub.
South Australia was relying on accessing power from Australia's populous east coast via a power interconnector with the neighbouring state of Victoria when there was a failure yesterday.
No power was flowing from Victoria into South Australia, said a spokesman for the Australian Energy Market Operator, which operates the power systems in southern and eastern Australia.
When the state tried to compensate, it experienced what is known as a "voltage collapse", Simon Emms, executive manager of network services at network operator ElectraNet, told ABC Radio, due to storm damage to power lines.
This led to a statewide outage, with SA Power Networks reporting 200,000 customers were left without electricity.
SA Power Networks said repairs to its transmission network were under way. A spokeswoman for ElectraNet said power was being restored to some areas of Adelaide, but could not say when the lights would go on across the state.
"Now, clearly, questions will be raised," Federal Minister for the Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg told Sky News.
"Serious questions will be raised that need to be answered as to how this extreme weather event could take out the whole of the electricity supply across a major state such as South Australia."
The impact was wide-ranging, with traffic coming to a standstill in Adelaide while power supplies were disrupted to BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam copper-uranium mine, a huge mining operation more than 500km to the northwest.
A BHP spokesman said back-up power generation was being used to run critical infrastructure.
Flooding risk
The Bureau of Meteorology has warned the wild weathe could produce wind gusts of up to 140km/h, especially along the west coast of Eyre Peninsula and up to 100mm of rain across the Adelaide Hills, bringing the risk of flooding.
A flood warning was also issued for Port Pirie, north of Adelaide, because of a storm surge and high waves.The State Emergency Service responded to more than 450 calls for help yesterday and chief officer Chris Beattie said the wild weather would continue for at least another day.
"There's still the potential for significant severe weather damage. We do have concerns for the coastal defences."
The SES has brought in strike teams from Western Australia to bolster local crews.
