As of midday Tuesday, SA Power Networks was still working to restore power to more than 11,700 customers – down from 35,000 on Monday and 163,000 on Saturday.

There are still 156 outages across South Australia, primarily in the Adelaide Hills where one blackout is affecting nearly 2000 customers across Blackwood, Coromandel Valley, Craigburn Farm and Hawthorndene.

Other significant outages are impacting hundreds of people in Cherry Gardens, Ironbank and Upper Sturt, while around 800 people are dealing with blackouts in Stirling and Aldgate.

A snapshot of power outages across the Adelaide HIlls at 11.15am today. Image: SA Power Networks

“We’ve still got a long way to go,” SA Power Networks head of corporate affairs Paul Roberts said.

“There’s some very significant damage where we’re going to have to rebuild the network.

“Particularly there’s a mountain of work in the area of Upper Sturt, back of Blackwood up through to Cherry Gardens, Ironbank… there’s a lot of damage, there’s a lot of trees down.”

The State Emergency Service has today been working through a backlog of around 200 incidents across South Australia, the majority related to downed trees in the Adelaide Hills, particularly in Hawthorndene, Upper Sturt and Stirling.

A snapshot of SES incident responses across Adelaide today. Image: SES

Roberts said there was a 2km stretch of powerline along Upper Sturt Road that would have to be rebuilt.

“We’re hoping to get the vast majority of people affected, that’s of the 12,000, back today,” Roberts said.

“But the Hills works will continue into tomorrow and potentially there’ll be some work into Thursday.”

Premier Peter Malinauskas said the areas that were still without power “represent the more complex lines having to be restored at various hard-to-reach places in the system”.

“I know that work is ongoing, we’re pressing South Australian Power Networks as hard as we can to provide as much information about how much longer it’ll take,” Malinauskas told reporters today.

“But clearly work remains ongoing around the clock.”

SA Power Networks workers investigating downed powerlines in Blackwood on Monday. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

He said 24 three-person crews from New South Wales are now working across South Australia to help SAPN restore power, after completing their safety induction today.

Twenty-four public schools and preschools, the majority in the Adelaide Hills, are closed again today due to power outages. Nearly 50 schools were closed on Monday due to blackouts.

Workers using a broom to move wires over a trailer in Coromandel Valley. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

Saturday’s storm – which featured more than 400,000 lightning strikes and prompted 2000 calls to emergency services – also disconnected the electricity interconnector between South Australia and Victoria due to the collapse of a 50-metre tall transmission tower.

With the interconnector out of action, SA is unable to export excess power to Victoria, meaning some wind farms and commercial solar systems in South Australia could be switched off and rooftop solar curtailed later this week.

ElectraNet chief executive Simon Emms said work to construct a temporary tower at Tailem Bend should be complete this weekend, allowing the link to the national power grid to be re-established.

He said the construction of a new permanent tower was expected to take several months.

The collapsed transmission tower in Tailem Bend. Photo: Electranet/Twitter

With fine weather forecast across SA later this week, Emms said Thursday was looming as the most crucial day when the state would have too much power, forcing some to be dialled back to maintain grid stability.

“On Thursday we’ll work with the Australian Energy Market Operator and SA Power Networks. In the first step they’ll turn off wind farms and commercial solar farms to minimise the impact on rooftop solar,” he said.

“To maintain system security, we need a certain number of gas-fired units on, so that requires the dialling down of the renewable generation during the peak period.”

Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said there was “no system in the world that can withstand storms and trees moving around through these extreme weather events”.

“So whether it’s the interconnector or distribution lines and Stobie poles, you are going to have breaks in the system,” he told reporters on Monday.

Koutsantonis also highlighted the work underway to construct the $2.4bn SA-NSW interconnector which would build more “resilience” into the system.

“What we’ve been doing now is building a new interconnector into New South Wales so we’ve got two [interconnectors] and so that there’s now a redundancy,” he said.

“When you’re building these systems, they are still subject to natural weather conditions and sometimes, as people have seen, you get these really really big weather events.

“And quite frankly with climate change, these weather events are becoming more often and more extreme, which then pushes us down towards this path of decarbonisation and making sure that we are able to decarbonise the planet.”

-With AAP