We reported on the South Australian electricity blackout – historic on the day 28Sep16 In comments I wished for “..needs nailing by a skilled questioner with experts under oath in front of media cameras.” Wow in due course we might see that unless the court action is settled first.
Today near three years later Lame Duck Govt bites back at four wind farms through the Australian Energy Regulator. The four wind farms are –
AGL Energy Limited in relation to the Hallett 1 (Hallett), Hallett 2 (Hallett Hill), Hallett 4 (North Brown Hill) and Hallett 5 (The Bluff) Wind Farms
Neoen SA in relation to the Hornsdale Wind Farm
Pacific Hydro Pty Ltd in relation to the Clements Gap Wind Farm
Tilt Renewables Limited in relation to the Snowtown 2 Wind Farm (comprising Snowtown Wind Farm Stage 2 North and Snowtown South Wind Farm).
This AER legal process has been bubbling along quietly for near three years and might explain why AGL has extended the life of Liddell. I see Pacific Hydro is owned by the Chinese State Power Investment Corporation.
> ” … nailing by a skilled questioner with experts under oath in front of media cameras”
Oh, how we might wish. Before any of that, tt would be settled out of court with gag orders on the settlement. Even the initial court proceedings would attract no media cameras, or at least any that would then broadcast the content at peak viewing.
Evidence for that is seen in the linked ABC news report on pending court action, wherein the AER is alleging that the windfarms had not equipped their installations with ride-through programs, despite being required to, and that this contractual failure had been deliberately hidden from the AER.
In other words, the windmills shut down in gail force winds to avoid damage, contrary to AER expectations. Never will this allegation be publicised in a form understandable to the populace at large. AGL is now complaining that this is “highly technical” (PR code for supressing the information from public viewing).
This allegation agrees with the 1st AEMO report on the system black – that the windmills stopped some nanoseconds prior to the tower collapse. The Vic interconnector shut off due to the sudden load increase (windmills stopping) *before* the tower collapse. I know this is what the 1st AEMO report detailed because I have kept a PDF copy of it – kept because of the highly likely and later confirmed attempts to bury this information.
I think this AER action is another product of the shock LNP election win. Obviously AER has been picking at this scab for years but if GreenLabor had won on 18May as we all expected then this AER work would have been buried. Last night ABC TV news raised issues suggesting people who suffered losses from the blackout might be able to claim compo thru a favourable AER court outcome or negotiated outcome. I imagine AER costs post the blackout would be way + a $Million already and likely to take on a rocket like trajectory the further they go down the court processes road. Court would be a QC’s festival.
If the renewable energy was supposed to prevent extreme weather/climate, it failed spectacularly:
Seven tornadoes hit SA on day of massive blackout: Bureau of Meteorology report –
www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/seven-tornadoes-hit-sa-on-day-of-massive-blackout-bureau-of-meteorology-report/news-story/e888d155c01b910778132d68e93c9d6a
Can you imagine the effect if wind farms had to supply reliably? They would need storage and this would have to be batteries. The most likely reaction would be for the operators to abandon the turbines.
@Graeme#3
> ” … operators to abandon the turbines”
Yes. This is why I expect the AER case to be settled out of court and MSM silence included as part of the settlement.
Blackouts across the UK.
BBC Now saying [The enormous impact of this power failure is likely to lead to questions about the strength and robustness of the system.
The BBC understands that two power supply plants – one a traditional gas and steam-fired power station in Cambridgeshire, the other a huge wind-turbine farm in the North Sea – failed at about 16:00 BST.
National Grid described it as an “unexpected, and unusual event”.
An additional factor may have been capacity problems at Britain’s largest single power station in Yorkshire.
The sudden drop in available power caused protective measures to kick in that immediately cut electricity supply to a section of the National Grid network.
By 18:30 BST the problems were fixed and the system was described as operating normally by the National Grid. ] Knowing GreenMedia deep lurve for their renewables darlings – we will wait for more considered analysis.
Hows this for a clue to what happened in the UK?
“Strong winds led to exceptional volumes of renewable power on the system, and fewer thermal plant generating as a result. That reduced inertia on the system, reducing the available resources to manage the outages, resulting in frequency quickly dropping to 48.9hz – well below tolerance boundaries.”
A bit more detail here below. I wonder how long this page will stick around?
“Inertia is valuable to the power system because it helps keep frequency stable: If frequency deviates much from 50Hz, there is a risk of the lights going out.
Large power stations, with big spinning turbines, are traditional sources of inertia. While wind turbines also provide inertia, that is dependent on weather and wind speed. As centralised power systems come off the system, or operate less, National Grid has less inertia in its toolbox to manage frequency – and has to take more actions to balance the system, such as calling on demand-side response providers via services such as frequency response.”
Fairly obviously now that national grids are being designed by children as an excuse to wag school and foreign enemies via rent a crowd, complexities such as these have no hope of being correctly addressed. Forget the finer details such as power factor phase angle fluctuations vs reactance time domain reflectometry that electronics and electrical engineers may once have considered.
comparing inertia to a car on the road, it seems the sequence of events when looked at over the longer time period is…
1) The worlds biggest wind farm begins to go online and begins to wobble the grid and force normal generation to relax control of the inertia steering wheel.
2) The instability it introduces while nothing is steering the frequency and phase, crashes the grid. One million people without anything that requires mains electricity working around them.
In the future.
3) The problem gets worse.
“There are now less than 50 turbines still to be installed off the Yorkshire coast.”
Hilarious – Daily Mail reports – “Renewables UK, which promotes wind power in the EU, boasted on its Twitter account that wind was generating 47.6 per cent of our electricity – just hours before the blackout occurred”.