Josh Frydenberg is calling for a “real debate” about renewable energy in the wake of South Australia’s dramatic blackout.

Despite SA’s vast renewable energy assets not causing or exacerbating the blackout, members of the Federal Government have nevertheless launched into a line of questioning about the resilience of green power.

“When you have a high use of renewables, some 41 per cent in South Australia, it leads to a lack of consistency in the quantity of generation, namely that when the wind’s not blowing, or the sun’s not shining, electricity is not being generated, and that means there’s a higher reliance on interconnectors,” Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg told Sky News on the weekend.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull similarly condemned the “extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic” renewable energy targets set by Labor state governments, pointing to Victoria and Queensland as other states he believed “paid little or no attention to energy security”.

“I am a very strong supporter of renewable energy, always have been,” Mr Turnbull told 3AW radio on Friday.

“We've got to reduce our emissions, that's very important. But we have to maintain energy security and reliability and we have to maintain affordability.”

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce described the blackout as a “complete Labor power failure” in South Australia.

It is unclear whether the Prime Minister, his Deputy or his Energy Minister had heard the Australian Energy Market Operator’s reading of the situation, which linked the state-wide power shutdown to storm and lightning damage on energy transmission infrastructure, not the state’s wind farms or other renewable sources.

“The considerable impact to important electricity infrastructure triggered the automatic disconnection of generation supply as part of the network's safety protection mechanism,” AEMO said in a statement last Wednesday night.

The state Labor premiers hit back too, with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews describing the blackouts as “a natural disaster”, accusing Mr Turnbull of “peddling completely ill-informed rubbish about how we generate our energy”.

SA Premier Jay Weatherill pointed out that the destruction of large transmission towers near Port Augusta triggered the state-wide blackout.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told The Australian; “I thought the Prime Minister wanted more renewables - at least that's what he said at the election.”

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr and Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael Gunner have ruled out any changes to their existing renewable energy targets in the wake of the storms.

This week, some leading Australian energy experts have given their views.

“These kinds of failures in the National Energy Market ([NEM] which covers the five eastern states) are extremely rare,” said Deputy Director of the Energy Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Roger Dargaville.

“The NEM experiences a range of extreme weather on a regular occurrence and a vast majority of the time copes well.

“The system contains multiple levels of redundancy and safety mechanisms, however it is impractical if not impossible to build any complex system that is completely 100 per cent reliable.

“That being said, as we find out more about the incident it may become apparent that there are weaknesses in the grid that need addressing. However, it is hard to imagine how the high penetration of renewable energy in the state could be implicated in this incident.

“Just under 1,000 megawatts of wind power was dispatching onto the grid at the time of the blackout with another 400 megawatts from gas plant and 300 megawatts supply from the Victorian inter-connector making up the total. Had either of the brown coal generators still been in operation the system would not have been any more resilient to this event.”

Professor Ken Baldwin - Director of the Energy Change Institute and Deputy Director of the Research School of Physics and Engineering at the Australian National University – said there was almost a “unanimity of views amongst experts in the electricity sector that the South Australian blackout was the result of transmission failures caused by an extreme weather event, which had nothing to do with the State’s high level of renewable energy.”

Associate Professor Iain MacGill - Joint Director (Engineering) of the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets (CEEM) at UNSW – said that one way to avoid similar issues in the future was through more renewable energy.

“Our failure to date to effectively address climate change brings its own risks,” he said.

“Extreme weather such as South Australia experienced earlier this week has always posed challenges for the electricity sector – ask anyone who has lived through a cyclone in Northern Queensland.

“The climate science seems clear that unchecked global warming will drive additional risks of extreme weather events that threaten infrastructure including the electricity sector.”

But Martin Sevior - Associate Professor at Melbourne University’s School of Physics - was not so quick to rule out the idea that renewable energy contributed to the blackout.

“The statement 'nothing to do with renewable energy' is not quite true,” he said.

“South Australia’s renewable electricity facilities are located throughout a large area of the state and power from those assets must be collected and transmitted to where it is consumed.

“In addition the tax credits used to make renewable energy competitive in SA crowded out local fossil fuel generation assets making it necessary to instead import fossil fuel generated power from Victoria.

“Both conditions mean that the SA power network is more sensitive to disruption than without the large reliance on renewable energy.

“One could speculate that if large power generation capacity was located to the East of Port Augusta, the effect of the storm could simply have been the isolation of the western region of the State, leaving Adelaide and most of the population unaffected.

“I hope that there is inquiry into the incident so that we can learn how to make power networks more resilient in the future,” he concluded.

Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg says a full inquiry into exactly what happened should be discussed at a Council of Australian Governments meeting this week.