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Redundancy is used for isolated faults and system protection, not widespread destruction of transmission lines.

Have a read up about "Cascading failure" for more info

This is what really happened...

Storms[edit]

On the day of the failure, South Australia experienced a violent storm reported as being a once-in-50-year event.[2] There was gale force and storm force wind across wide areas of the state. It included at least two tornadoes in the vicinity of Blyth.[3] The state was hit by at least 80,000 lightning strikes.[4] The wind damaged a total of 23 pylons on electricity transmission lines, including damage on three of the four interconnectors connecting the Adelaide area to the north and west of the state.

Power grid[edit]

The South Australian power grid is operated by ElectraNet and connected to the National Electricity Market via two interconnectors to Victoria. These are the Heywood interconnector (recently upgraded to 650MW at 275kV)[5] in the southeast of the state and the Murraylink (220MW at 150kV) HVDC further north, connecting Berri to Red Cliffs in Victoria.[6] The Heywood interconnector had been down for upgrade earlier in the year, and was initially blamed for the widespread outage.

Blackout[edit]

The weather had resulted in localised power outages throughout the day, but at around 3:50 p.m. local time, almost the entire state power grid cut out. Early indications were that as the transmission lines in the Mid North failed due to damaged pylons, the automatic safety features in the network isolated the generators to protect both the generation facilities and the end consumers' equipment. Over a short period, this resulted in most of the state's distribution network being powered down as the transmission network acted to protect it.

Restoration[edit]

As so much of the network had been shut down, the authorities needed to act carefully to bring it back online and provide a stable network. This was initiated in the first few hours following the start of the outage, initially using the Victorian interconnectors to establish a stable frequency on the network, and gradually add South Australia's power generators to the network and restore power to areas as soon as possible. The initial focus was to restore power to the Adelaide metropolitan area, and suburbs started to regain power within about three hours, and much of the city power was restored by 10 p.m. By the following morning, power had been restored to most of the areas of Adelaide and the areas south and east of it that did not have storm damage to the distribution network. The substantial damage to the transmission network north of Adelaide meant that large areas of the Mid North and Eyre Peninsula did not have power restored within 24 hours, and further damaging weather indicated that it could be at least the end of the weekend before some of those areas were restored.[7]

Due to the extensive nature of the damage temporary transmission towers were sent by Western Power these towers can reach a height of 58 metres and take only one day to erect, it is expected that the towers will remain in use for 6 to 12 months while the permanent repairs are made.[8]

None of this happened as a result of the use of renewable energy. There is no connection and to allege as such is simply a political witch hunt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South...n_blackout