SA Blackouts

[Redneck]

South Australian blackout 'nothing to do with renewable energy': experts

In August 2003 in the US state of Ohio, a single overloaded power line touched a tree limb and short-circuited.

The cascading electricity outages that resulted plunged 50 million people into darkness, including millions of consumers in Canada, and became the biggest blackout in North American history.

A subsequent investigation stressed that the king of all blackouts was a "grid issue" not an issue of power generation.

Energy market experts on Thursday said South Australia's statewide blackout during a once-in-50-years storm was similarly nothing to do with that state's mix of power generation and high reliance on wind energy.

Hugh Saddler, a senior principal consultant at infrastructure specialists Pitt & Sherry said the SA shout down has "absolutely nothing to do with renewable energy"

"It's a transmission system failure. It's a rare event but one that has happened in various places around the world, including much larger events in the US and Canada," he said.

South Australia was hit by more than 80,000 lightning strikes on Wednesday, including a direct strike at a power station, and 22 transmission poles came down.

"It had nothing to do with wind generation. It's all very confusing for people and politicians are using it as an opportunity to get on their ideological hobby horses," said Mr Saddler.

Bruce Mountain, director of carbon and energy markets at consultants CME said the initial signs pointed to wind knocking out transmission lines that bring power from interstate, which immediately cut 40 per cent of supply from the grid.

"The interconnectors were already running close to their limit and so could not replace the lost supply," he said.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull both raised concerns with South Australia's ...
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull both raised concerns with South Australia's energy infrastructure on Thursday. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Gas-fired electricity generators close to Adelaide could not increase production quickly enough to replace the sudden dip in capacity.

"The loss of so much capacity led quite quickly to the automatic disconnection of the interconnectors and hence the cascading failure of the South Australian power system," Mr Mountain said.

The cascading nature of the transmission lines going down is echoed in some of the biggest US failures, said Mr Saddler.

The expert view of the cause of the blackout has not prevented a political storm over SA's almost 40 per cent renewables in its generation mix.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce blamed South Australia's rush to renewables for the blackout when speaking to the ABC on Thursday, saying: "the question has to be asked, is [South Australia's] overreliance on renewable energies exacerbating their problems and their capacity to have a secure power supply?"

Senator Nick Xenophon, a long-time critic of wind power, also suggested a failure of wind energy was to blame for the blackout, telling the ABC: "The generators don't work when the wind is blowing too hard."
The storm passes through Woomera in SA's north on Wednesday morning.
The storm passes through Woomera in SA's north on Wednesday morning. Photo: Bureau of Meteorology

But SA Premier Jay Weatherill denied renewables were to blame, describing the incident as a "catastrophic failure of infrastructure which brought down our network".

"There will [always] be somebody who will use a crisis to pull out their real agenda, which is they don't like renewable energy," he said.

Federal Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg said advice to him from the Australian Energy Market Operator was that the blackout was due to a "weather event".

"The weather event led to those transmission towers being bowled over, led to the lightning strike in the power station and led to the interconnector being shut down. So there was a cascading effect across the network. That was a weather event," he said.

Mr Frydenberg stressed he is also concerned about the "other side of the coin", SA's reliance on what he called the "intermittent" power supply from wind farms.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull criticised Labor governments in multiple states for setting "unrealistic" renewable energy targets.

"I regret to say that a number of the state Labor governments have over the years set priorities and renewable targets that are extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic, and have paid little or no attention to energy security," he said. "This is not just focused on SA but the same observation can be made about Queensland or indeed Victoria."

The Prime Minister has directed Mr Frydenberg to gather state energy ministers to discuss the supply issue.

"Let me be absolutely clear – energy security is this government's number one priority. We must keep the lights on. And while we are transitioning to a lower emissions future, we will not compromise on energy security," Mr Frydenberg said.

Muddying the picture around SA's electricity supply is a current debate around the price of power in that state when the wind is low and more energy needs to be imported from Victoria.

A Grattan Institute report released on Sunday argued that there is a disconnect between climate change policy and the realities of the Australian energy market.

Business weighed in quickly on Thursday, with the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry called for the coming investigation to include the energy mix in SA.

"We will need to ask serious questions about how an entire state lost access to power, which is unacceptable for business and the rest of the community. We need to understand the role unique weather events played in the blackout and what network changes in South Australia and beyond can protect against future outages," said James Pearson, chief executive of ACCI.

"The South Australian business community, represented by Business SA, has previously called for an independent inquiry to assess all options to transition the state's electricity network to a low-carbon future that promotes the interests of consumers with respect to price, quality, reliability and safety."

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox described the blackout as a "sobering new dimension to SA's power woes, which have been undermining confidence and causing major price spikes for some time".

"It is hard to accept that the entire state is vulnerable to shutdown in a critical incident. Dealing with this situation needs to be a national priority and we are talking to all concerned to ensure future disruptions are minimised.

But the Australian Conservation Foundation said the blackout "had nothing to do with South Australia's renewable energy".

"If South Australia was powered entirely by coal, rather than by 40 per cent clean renewable energy, as it is, this blackout would still have happened," said ACF's campaigns director Paul Sinclair.

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This certainly does make you wonder if they need more redundancy to cover these sort of events, almost unbelievable that towers going down can kill the whole states power

[IQS.RLOW]

Seriously?

If it wasnt for idiot wind power, the SA wouldnt have needed the transmission towers that collapsed and shut down the power grid. This was wholly the fault of idiot ALP renewable energy policy and typical ALP implementation.

"Hurr durr letz have renewballs and imports teh coal power from anova state so weez can say renewballs r us"

Fucking ALP retards

[Redneck]

Seriously?

If it wasnt for idiot wind power, the SA wouldnt have needed the transmission towers that collapsed and shut down the power grid. This was wholly the fault of idiot ALP renewable energy policy and typical ALP implementation.

"Hurr durr letz have renewballs and imports teh coal power from anova state so weez can say renewballs r us"

Fucking ALP retards

Not too sure if that is correct!

The wind farms would have automatically shut down as well when confronted with the 23 towers failure as they would be feeding the same grid. So whether the wind farms were operating or not is irrelevant!

[IQS.RLOW]

Seriously?

If it wasnt for idiot wind power, the SA wouldnt have needed the transmission towers that collapsed and shut down the power grid. This was wholly the fault of idiot ALP renewable energy policy and typical ALP implementation.

"Hurr durr letz have renewballs and imports teh coal power from anova state so weez can say renewballs r us"

Fucking ALP retards

Not too sure if that is correct!

The wind farms would have automatically shut down as well when confronted with the 23 towers failure as they would be feeding the same grid. So whether the wind farms were operating or not is irrelevant!

Of course they would have shut down. They are useless without the base load requirement that SA sucks out of eastern states coal fired plants.

[Redneck]

I have a few thoughts/questions on the outage.

Firstly the fact that the wind generators were not working due to high winds is irrelevant as they would have automatically shut down by the fault the same as the interconnectors did had they been running. Whether them being still offline due to high winds after the event caused the restoration to be delayed is a possibility.

Were both interconnectors in operation before the failure? John Smith suggested one was out for maintenance , now I realise that was the case in the previous failure (July?) but am not sure about Wednesdays event. I gather one interconnector comes into the state up near Berry and the other way down the bottom of the state somewhere around Mt Gambier , does this mean regardless of where the failure occurred within the state, both would shut down. That is assuming both were working

As a matter of interest where about in SA was it that the twenty odd towers were blown over?