The article mentions they had a generator but it was inadequate...

The article mentions they had a generator but it was inadequate to cope with the demand and the outage. It could only maintain a small coolstore, and although some stock was transferred and saved, a great deal was lost. Potentially though a few Redflow batteries would have bought time to bring in generators if they were available in a more limited outage. But a state wide outage would create huge demand for existing portable generators. It simply exposed the inadequacy of the current system which relies on a hugely expensive and vulnerable continuous generation system geared to peak power demand. It is always going to be vulnerable to natural disasters unless it incorporates some local energy storage which would also diminish the need for excess generation capacity to meet peak demands. I suspect that insurance companies will claim their policies do not cover much of the losses from natural disasters, and many businesses will be left out of pocket. It also means there is currently no reason for the insurance companies to want to subsidise battery installation by giving customers policy discounts if they have them.