Greet said Australia's energy security needed to be assessed beyond what appeared to be the remit of the COAG review panel chaired by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel.

The Australian Energy Market Operator revealed last week that nine of SA's 13 wind farms online did not ride through the six voltage disturbances as the software running them was designed to disconnect them or reduce output when between three to six disturbances were detected within a set time period.

Greet said that while it was clear that wind energy was a factor in SA's blackout, so were a number of other things like the stunning failure of the transmission towers and the vulnerability of the system to online failures.

"Wind was a factor, but the transmission lines' design was also a factor," Greet said.

"I'm rather surprised that those transmission lines fell down. They didn't fall down to that extent in northern Queensland during the cyclones, so this is one of the things we have to pick apart. They're all factors and they affect each other in a systemic way.

"Sometimes several things going down multiplied that effect, and that's what happened in South Australia, making it a bigger disaster than what it was."

He said it would be superficial to obsess, as some have, with whether or not SA's reliance on renewable energy was the root cause.

"The software did what it was designed to do, but perhaps the whole thing wasn't thought through," Greet told Energy News.

While the voltage fluctuations across the generators were designed to cut out at a certain point of tolerance, one veteran electrical engineer in a recent forum in Canberra on energy security which EA hosted reportedly piped up with: "Why didn't we just load-shed? Why didn't we plan better?"

Greet said there was plenty more to come from the fallout of the SA blackout, which will be a good case study of how the country handles transition planning, if the Finkel's review accepts lateral thinking.

The aforementioned forum was yet another chapter in the opening up of public debate facilitated by EA's more recent partnerships with the Australian National University.

ANU has joined several of its colleges together in an energy and security cluster to look at not only the domestic electrical grid but interconnectivity of energy markets from domestic through to international, and how that impacts the security of Australia.

EA started the ball rolling three years ago when it combined two bodies of work around fuel security and disaster resilience. The group then started looking at oil and gas as a long-lived reality in the geopolitical world, which triggered the collaboration with ANU.

It was perhaps no surprise to these researchers when both Tasmania and South Australia experienced electrical supply disruptions this year alone.

"That's why we ran the forum, because what's wrong is people aren't looking at how the whole strategic picture comes together," Greet said.

Greet, who hosted the most recent October 13 event Canberra, attended by army generals, academia and energy experts and professionals, said it was not erroneous of the energy sector to embrace the so-called "Internet of Things" to improve energy productivity and efficiency.

"It's a marvellous thing, but perhaps now we're starting to see some unintended consequences, and it highlights things we need to be aware of if we are to remain secure into the future," he said.

Addressing the forum, Professor Ken Baldwin, a director at the ANU Energy Change Institute, agreed that Australia needed to consider the inter-dependency of the electricity system, the heavy reliance on internet connectivity and the geopolitical risk of fuel supply chains.

"We have to take all these factors into account and develop a systems approach that looks at all these risks and keeps our energy sector strong," Baldwin said.

"It's also essential that we consider the impacts of climate change, both in terms of the need to reduce emissions and the need to protect our energy systems from the increased risk of extreme weather events."

Speakers at the forum agreed that co-operation and collaboration between state and federal government agencies, researchers and the energy industry was essential.

"We need to recognise that there is no such thing as absolute security of energy supply as this would require infinite sums of money," Baldwin said.

"But through greater co-operation and a systemic approach, we can dramatically minimise risks to our energy security. This demands a highly collaborative engagement that crosses institutional barriers."

However, Greet said technology was less an issue than "the human, collaborative and co-operative mechanisms to make our systems work well" which are currently lacking.

"This requires the political will to make the necessary regulatory and institutional reform happen," he said.