A dairy farmer is dead and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses remain without power after Victoria’s destructive storms.

“We’ve had one fatality confirmed, a dairy farmer in Mirboo North who was killed in the storms that went through South Gippsland last night,” Premier Jacinta Allan told reporters on Wednesday.

She said the storms had created significant damage statewide, with wind and trees taking down power lines.

In one of the largest power outages in Victorian history, it could take weeks to fully fix.

Hundreds of power poles and lines were downed and six transmission towers near Anakie collapsed on Tuesday, sending all four units at the Loy Yang A power station offline.

At its peak, 529,000 properties were without power due to the damage from storms, strong winds and lightning.

That number had dwindled to roughly 250,000 on Wednesday morning but the Australian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action warned progress could be slow.

“Crews are actively working to restore power to these impacted areas,” the department said.

“However, given the extent of the widespread damage, it may take days if not weeks to restore electricity to all of those impacted.”

Loy Yang A, a coal-fired plant in the Latrobe Valley to the state’s east, generates about 30 per cent of Victoria’s power.

The station’s owner, AGL, confirmed two units have returned to service as of Wednesday morning.

The others are expected to progressively come back online in the next 24 hours, it said in a statement to the stock exchange.

The network disruption pushed the spot power price in Victoria and Tasmania to its ceiling of $16,600 per MW-hour, hundreds of times higher than typical levels.

But Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Daniel Westerman said the high wholesale power prices were back to normal.

“It was also at the market price floor yesterday ... so that means consumers are being paid to take that energy,” he told ABC Radio Melbourne.

“It was a volatile day.”

While admitting the bending of the transmission towers under severe winds was disturbing, Westerman said it was not unheard of.

“Transmission lines folded over and lying on the ground has happened before in the last couple of years,” he said.

“Those weather events are becoming more and more severe.”

Dozens of schools or early-learning centres across Victoria are closed on Wednesday morning because of fire warnings or power outages.

“Schools are making every effort to provide information to families as quickly as they can and where possible are providing supervision for students where they need it,” an education department spokesman said.

Traffic lights were also impacted by the widespread outages, with the State Emergency Service fielding 2750 calls for help from midday on Tuesday to 6am, local time, on Wednesday.

“This has been one of the largest outage events in the state’s history,” Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio wrote on X.

Federal Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neill, who represents the Melbourne electorate of Hotham, said it was surprising so many homes lost power.

“There’s some really important questions to ask and answer here about how it’s possible that a country like Australia can lose power for 500,000 people because of a storm,” she told Seven’s Sunrise programme today.

“But I do think those questions are for later.”

Tuesday was a scorcher for multiple states, but Victoria suffered the worst with temperatures surpassing 40C in some parts and thunderstorms swept the state, starting fires.

A catastrophic fire danger rating was declared for some parts of Victoria on Tuesday, the first since the deadly Black Summer of 2019-20.