The lights were hardly out in South Australia before politicians and lobby groups were staking out their ground in the debate over climate change and renewable energy.
Within hours of a massive storm that triggered a statewide power blackout, the Climate Council was blaming global warming for the wild weather.
It was a "disturbing preview of what's likely to come if Australia fails to act on climate change", council member Will Steffen claimed.
Renewable energy sceptics inside the federal government didn't quite say we told you so, but the message was none too subtle.
SA's aggressive pursuit of renewable energy that supplies about 40 per cent of the state's power had put the stability of not only its energy network at risk, but the rest of Australia as it pursues a low carbon emissions future.
"There are serious questions for the future of the energy system about how do we combine energy policy and climate policy," said Josh Frydenberg, the federal minister responsible for energy and the environment.
"How do we keep the lights on."
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull "regrets" state Labor governments over the years have set "extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic" renewable targets without paying attention to energy security.
Setting targets up to 50 per cent, as both SA and Queensland have done, was a political or ideological statement, he said.
The Commonwealth target is 23.5 per cent by 2020, and is tracking at 15 per cent now.
How the states and territories manage an increasing reliance on renewable energy will be the focus of a special COAG meeting Mr Frydenberg intends holding within weeks.
"There are real questions for the future of the national electricity network as to how we make this transition effectively," he said.
"You can't have a situation like last night."
SA Premier Jay Weatherill insists the lengthy outage was caused by bad weather and renewable energy was not to blame.
Independent senator Nick Xenophon is not convinced, calling for an inquiry into his state's power supply.
He wants the Australian Energy Market Commission to carry out a robust independent analysis to learn lessons from the incident and ascertain whether SA's energy mix made it more vulnerable to an outage.
The Climate Institute used the SA outage to point to its analysis four years ago that found Australia's electricity system to be underprepared for the impacts of climate change.
It assessed the risk of damage from more extreme wind intensity and rainfall as "high".
Energy expert Andrew Stock, a member of the Climate Council, dismissed attempts to blame renewables for the blackout as opportunistic and irresponsible.
"Storms can knock out electricity networks no matter where the power supply is coming from," he said.
At the time of the blackout, 1000MW of wind power was being fed into the South Australian system.
The council warns the SA storm event is a sign of weather to come.
"The atmosphere is packing much more energy than 70 years ago, which contributes to the increasing intensity of such storms, " Professor Steffen said.
Intense rainfall was projected to increase in Australia and had already increased at a global level.
"This is a prelude to a disturbing future, and it's only going to get worse if we don't address climate change."
Even business has bought into the debate, with the Australian Chamber of Commerce saying the power outage was a wake-up call for policymakers
"We will need to ask serious questions about how an entire state lost access to power, which is unacceptable for business and the rest of the community," chief executive James Pearson said.
