Renewable Energy, Resources

South Australian electricity blackout – historic

29 Comments

Rely on wind power – decommission your reliable coal fired generators – who could be surprised at a blackout. Nemwatch. As I write the AEMO Electricity Price and Demand www site shows none of their usual charts & data.

29 thoughts on “South Australian electricity blackout – historic”

  2. The same storm went through WA yesterday without any power outages.

    God preserve us from Green Labor lunacy.

  3. When you vote in an ideologically obsessed government such as that of Jay Weatherill, inevitably you must pay the price, because weather dependent power is… well weather dependent.
    But let’s acknowledge that such a major storm is always going to play havoc with transmission and distribution lines, but when you have as SA does a wind based generation system that must shut down when the wind is too strong then that simply adds another, unnecessary, dimension to the problem.

  4. Lights out, phones down, computers down, trains and trams not moving. Just think if buses and cars were electric -everything would be a standstill. Everyone walking to get home just as the “greens” would wish except the coffee machines would not work for their latte. do think this will be awake up call? Nah! Turnbull, Bishop and the rabble in the ALP still want to bow to the socialists in the UN. We should pray that Donald is successful in November and then in January keeps his promise to stop the “climate” and sustainability nonsense. Support “Clexit”

  5. When I was in Coral Bay recently, I learned the wind turbines there can fold flat to the ground in the event of a cyclone. Which makes me suspect there could be permanent damage from the SA storm.

  6. I see the ABC quickly full of renewables proponents all getting the meme correct.
    “SA power outage: how did it happen?”
    www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-28/sa-power-outage-explainer/7886090?WT.ac=statenews_sa

    “SA weather: No link between blackout and renewable energy, experts say”
    www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-29/sa-weather:-no-link-between-blackout-and-renewables-expert-says/7887052?WT.ac=statenews_sa

    We need an inquiry with electricity grid experts called under oath to examine all the hours of the blackout minute by minute if that detail is required. Who could set up such an inquiry?

  7. Just had a look at NemWatch website and at just before 11am (NEM time) which would be 10.30 SA, wind is producing about 18% of the 1300MW being generated in SA. Think their typical demand is around 2000MW this time of the day.
    So why so little wind generation? Is the wind not blowing? Quick look at the BoM site and looks like the wind there 20-30 km/hr typically so is there a problem with some of their equipment. Will have to look elsewhere (AEMO) when I get time

  8. Some interesting claims in the second ABC article linked by Beachgirl:

    “If you’ve got a wind farm or a coal-fired power station at the end of a transmission line, and that system either is taken out by a storm or is forced to shut down to protect itself from a storm, it doesn’t matter what the energy source is.”

    Well, yes, but how much more likely is it that wind power would need to shut down in high wind?

    “This is a one-in-a-50 year, almost-unprecedented event for the state that couldn’t have been prevented or foreseen.”

    Funny how it could not have been foreseen yet the expert knows how often it’s going to happen.

    In the other article, another expert concedes an “increased risk” from relying on wind power and interstate interconnectors. In any case, SA power prices have been skyrocketing, further reducing the state’s competitiveness and putting its whole economy at risk. As others have said here, a full inquiry is needed.

  9. Maybe the SA Government’s Ministry of Truth will need to seek assistance from the BoM when it comes to homogenising and adjusting the data recorded by ElectraNet’s event recorders?

  10. Yesterday evening on ABC TV news24 SA Premier Weatherill at a press conference casually mentioned “baseload power” – does he think SA has baseload power?? – deluded. Of course no journo said the obvious to him – “mate SA has no baseload power.” Erratic wind certainly can not fit the bill for baseload and the gas generators were all built as peaking stations not baseload.
    Good idea for a public inquiry with powers to call expert witnesses under oath – the event needs examining minute by minute.
    Here is the 5 minute chart for SA preserved here –

    From this AEMO page
    www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-dashboard#price-demand
    note the series of ~10 huge price spikes ranging from $14,000 to minus $1,000. The price this morning has sometimes been negative – has been minus $45 a few times. Sounds like a logical way to run an electricity grid – have a negative price – yair that will work, that will make generators eager to spend money starting up to supply power. Agree that whole period of the blackout and huge price oscillations needs explaining by expert grid engineers under oath.
    Note too this chart from the Aneroid pages –
    energy.anero.id.au/wind-energy

    showing just the South Australian wind farms. The blackout is plain enough – why was only the Hallett 1 Wind Farm generating during the worst of the blackout? Then after an hour ot two it stopped – then a break of several hours with no wind – then five other wind farms chip in small contributions but not Hallett 1.
    In view of 1-2-3 it puzzles me there had to be a blackout in Adelaide and SE.
    1 – there was plenty of warning from BoM about the gales so knowing that wind farms could likely have/cause issues in the gales surely prudent managers would have alerted a bit more gas fired to be on standby.
    2 – Plenty of gas fired generators around Adelaide.
    3 – the connections to Vic are in the East & SE so however many pylons blew over near Port Augusta – why did Adelaide and SE not remain on grid?

    I think taxpayers are entitled to have a detailed timeline so the entire blackout can be understood.

  11. Warwick I was a bit surprised how long it took to get some of the stand-by diesel and gas generators into service. Maybe a combination of failures to start (I believe that happened at the Royal Adelaide Hospital) and getting authority to run stand-by units for export. Re starting, this gives some indications of past problems with back-up starts at hospitals www.ihea.org.au/files/vic/ppt_-_bruce_sanderson.pdf . Some years ago i visited Queen Elizabeth Hospital Adelaide. At the time they had I think six 500 kw diesel generators converted to natural gas. I think they needed only 2 to run the hospital most of the time and used two for export particularly for peak and two on standby or down for maintenance. The heated engine cooling water was used for hot water (showers, laundry etc) and some became feed water for a small gas fired boiler for steam for the autoclaves. Maybe there is a problem of authority to run all units for export or maybe in the health departments wisdom they no longer export and have withdrawn some of the engines.
    I agree an inquiry is needed especially the needs for emergency such as hospitals, and phone towers (the NBN will make this worse) It is important to keep unions out of any inquiry.

  13. In any rational administration the collapse of 22 pylons in a gale where no weather records have been claimed, would itself be a cause for an inquiry into engineering design and construction & materials standards. But I hear not a word.

  14. The concept of energy self reliance comes to mind. It was a commonly held notion in the 1920s that because of the high moisture content and low calorific value of brown coal (requiring boilers of double the size and capital cost of black coal boilers) it would be more expensive to develop Victorian brown coal deposits than it would be to ship NSW black coal to appropriately located Victorian black coal power stations.
    Ultimately exploitation of Latrobe Valley brown coal won out because it offered both independence from the frequent NSW coal miners strikes and provided many new jobs in Victoria. So it while it wasn’t a question of electrical self sufficiency (interstate transmission connections hadn’t been thought of) surely there’s a lesson here for ideologues like Jay Weatherill and co.
    When you throw reason to the wind in the pursuit of political ambition, when it all blows up in your face – mate you’ve just got to wear it?

  16. Beachgirl true it’s a damaging event to have transmission towers down but whether its one or twenty it’s still a single contingency i.e. one transmission line. The design of Australian power grids has since the year dot been designed to cope with a worst case single contingency. Indeed Victoria and NSW, in spite of the penetration of intermittent renewables, would still satisfy of this requirement.
    Prior to its Gaia awakening SA would also have coped with such a contingency. But when you throw caution to the wind . . . . “what goes around comes around”.

  17. Just watched Will Steffen claim that this storm was influenced by climate change due to a higher level of water vapour in the air due to AGW.
    From the BoM website for average relative humidity in September for Adelaide.
    Waite Institute (Adelaide) 1925-1986 – 64% RH.
    West Terrace av from 1955-1977 – 54% RH.
    Northfield Research (Adelaide) 1972-1984 – 57% RH.
    Kent Town av from 1977-2010 – 51% RH.
    Seems like HR has been dropping over the past 90 years.

  18. Funny isn’t it that the blackouts have nothing to do with SA’s reliance on renewables and interconnectors, yet the only other state to get in strife recently, Tasmania, also relies heavily on renewables and interconnectors.

    Among the subjects for inquiry:

    1. What has been the cost of installing wind, including modifications to transmission and distribution systems to cope with it? Have these investments been at the expense of more reliable generation and distribution instrastructure?
    2. What was the total economic and social cost to South Australia of this blackout, and if wind was partly responsible, what is then the total cost of the pro-wind policy, when added to wind’s costs in terms of construction of turbines, upgrading transmission and distribution infrastructure, costs of back-up gas generators, costs related to interconnectors, economic losses due to increased power prices etc. etc.? What is this cost per tonne of CO2 emissions avoided by the policy?

  19. @Ian George Yes, contrary to predictions…as best as we can tell, global RH has fallen. THE main feedback that is supposed to drive enhanced GHG forcing has failed to materialize.

    @David Brewer What has been the cost? They haven’t even finished. In order to have high reliance on renewables, a nation must have grid interconnects capable of moving the entire output of whole regions.

    Basically, renewables give us all the down sides of local generation with all the down sides of centralized generation…and none of the benefits of either. As mentioned above, the grid also has to be built up…and not by some trivial amount, more like 5X the capacity across the entire grid (short of homes) just for electrical production.

    …and should household generation through renewables become a big thing for home owners, it gets worse. Right now the system assumes that home owners energy will all be consumed at the local level (by homes without). If everyone used solar the grid would have to be capable of operating backward.

    Right now the grid operates on th assumption that centralized power output will need to be stepped up to make up for losses. But when you run power in the opposite direction, not only do you have line losses, the transformers actually step the power DOWN (relative to levels closer to the power plant). So you basically double voltage drops. So you have to have transformers capable of operating in two modes or two transformers.

    @Bob in Castlemaine and yes, all of the above does mean that energy independence simply cannot happen regionally (as I mentioned above). You go from independence to near total dependence.

    @cementafriend And of course your points kind of hit an asymptote at yet another issue. Actual energy consumption in industrial nations is about 3X that of generation. Even if we switched to 100% CO2 free electricity, we’d still be emitting about 2/3 of the same amount of CO2. We would need to more than redouble our efforts after achieving 100% electrical production. This means the grid interconnects actually need to be capable of handling 3X as much electricity as a whole region consumes currently.

    None of these are insurmountable issues. They’re worse…they’re infeasibility issues. We could do all that…or we could use 1/5 the labor, steel, and concrete…and go with nuclear for base load and fracked gas for peaking…or crazy idea, just keep using whatever and deal with any actual climate change as it happens over the course of more than a lifetime…upgrading when the equipment dies naturally

  20. This ABC article is blind to the elephant in the AEMO control room
    SA Weather: Restoring power ‘very delicate affair’
    www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-29/restoring-power-in-sa-'very-delicate-affair'/7889846
    Of course it is a ‘very delicate affair’ restoring the grid now.
    However the article cunningly misleads – the real story they never tell – is that day in day out – whenever wind output is variable – the South Australian grid is only kept viable by constant and detailed costly interventions to keep frequency within limits and to balance demand against supply and to try and keep a spinning reserve. That’s the constant never ending 24/7 – ‘very delicate affair’.

  21. Warwick as you infer there has to be a question mark about negative power costs. Coal, diesel and gas producers can readily turn down production to match demand so their input price should always be positive. I get only think that the control of wind and solar is so poor that for safety reasons they have keep producing power and want the system to take it. But why would they want to pay for someone to take it unless they were forced (which I think they should if they can not supply due to unreliability). It is likely that due to subsidies (Germany there are government requirements to pay even when no demand ) that some wind farms can pass through some of their subsidies without going negative on the bottom profit line. However, a different point may be that the pricing data is rubbish and both the SA input peak and averages prices are meaningless.

  22. Cementafriend, wind can and regularly does bid negative pool prices at times when the wholesale pool price is low as it is during the early hours of the morning. Wind is able to do this because the loss incurred on the negative bid price is more than offset by what is received for the RET scheme LGCs (Large-scale Generation Certificates) produced, for which wind farm operators are currently paid more than $80 per MWh. These LGCs are ultimately paid for at the retail end of the cycle and constitute the compulsory RET subsidy you and I are forced to pay via our electricity bills.
    Obviously base load coal plants, the rock on which our electricity grids have been based for almost a century, cannot claim this RET subsidy hence they are forced off-line. Now base load coal plants, which unlike wind and solar can reliably produce constant power 24/7 for months at a time, cannot operate economically in such a stop start mode. Hence as has already happened in SA these coal plants are forced into premature closure, as we’ll likely soon see forced on the Hazelwood power plant in Victoria.

  24. Another aspect of the negative prices is that it lets renewable advocates crow that renewables are cheaper. Which is a distortion of what is really happening.
    It needs nailing by a skilled questioner with experts under oath in front of media cameras.

  25. cementafriend has said:

    > It is important to keep unions out of any inquiry.

    I agree completely, but just as important is to have the Terms of Inquiry set as broadly and publicly as possible, and most importantly, have the resultant report released to the general public without expurgation of any sort.

    When it’s put in stark language like that, it will never happen, will it ?

  26. @cementafriend Negative prices are possible with conventional power, but they’re closer to zero.

    The main issue is the bizarre distortion of both sides that subsidies and wind’s erratic nature have created.

    On the PR side, wind these ridiculous negative bids are averaged in to promote wind being “cheaper”. And their overall inability to sell their power when they produce (and the resulting near zero pricing) is also used for this. At the same time, the massive spikes their use incurs is tacked onto the cost of conventional energy. What these are actually showing however, is the REAL WORLD VALUE of the energy. In simple terms, ALMOST ALL VALUE…is in energy being available when/where you need it.

    The reality (as already stated) is that wind is worse than uncompetitive. It simply cannot pay for its self without subsidies. It never can. The laws of supply and demand mean that it will always force a state of buying low, selling high. When it produces, the price will be low. When it doesn’t produce, it forces people to pay more for limited supply of stable power production. If you combine the two…wind would likely come out negative.

    This is nothing but a reflection of the realities of the demand for energy. People would rather pay 2, 3, 4…probably 10X the price for stable energy than to have their power go on and off at the whims of the wind. This of course means that “load flexibility” is also largely a lie as well.

  27. Well said poitsplace – wind power would not survive without the compulsions of the MRET scheme.

    I thought readers might enjoy these headlines or even the articles from the reneweconomy people who kindly give us NemWatch.
    Just scroll right down past NemWatch.

    The thought of the useless lameduck coalition attacking anything is so off the screen.

  29. Pingback: AER takes four wind farms to court | Errors in IPCC climate science

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