South Australia's Backward-to-the-Future Move

Energy Insecurity

South Australia had a bit of a storm a few days ago.  It resulted in a state-wide power black out.  How did that happen?  Green energy.

South Australia has become seriously committed to wind power.  It plans to help stop the world warming up, and this is a great way to do it.  Now over fifty percent of South Australia's electricity comes from wind power.  There is just a wee problem.  The storm winds a few days ago were so powerful, the state's wind turbines were automatically shut down.  Ergo: brown outs and no electricity.

Australia's Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull lost no time pointing out the obvious:

. . . Mr Turnbull told reporters [South Australia Premier] Mr Weatherill still had a case to answer to “keep the lights on” in his state.  “What we need to do across all levels of government is this - we have to deliver energy security. Rule one - keep the lights on,” he said.  “Second, we have to ensure that energy is affordable. SA has the highest wholesale energy costs in Australia.  So that is a problem for SA and the government, Mr Weatherill has to answer for that.”  [Newscom.au]

The first official report into the disaster concluded that the state's wind power over-capacity was the first cause of the problem.  Everything else cascaded down from that.  This was not a politically correct conclusion, but facts can be stubborn things, it seems.

Although power was initially maintained, at 4.18pm (AEST) multiple faults in a short period of time caused 315 MW of wind power to disconnect.  To make up the shortfall, the network tried to get more power via the Heywood interconnector, which provides SA with electricity from Victoria. But this caused the interconnector to overload.  It took “less than half a second” for this to trigger an “automatic-protection mechanism” that cut off the power in SA in order to protect the interconnector from being damaged.

Actually, that's about as sanitised an account could get.  What caused "315 MW of wind power to disconnect"?  High winds.  Yup.  You read that right.  The state's ubiquitous wind farms automatically shut the wind turbines down because the winds were too high.

Just before the blackout, almost half of the state’s power was being supplied by wind farms (883 MW), with the rest coming from thermal (330MW) and electricity imports from Victoria through both the Heywood Interconnector and Murraylink DC cable (613MW in total).

In the seconds before the blackout, the network experienced a reduction in power from six wind farms including Hornsdale and Snowtown.  “Each reduction coincided with a drop in voltage observed at the wind farms’ connection points,” the report said.  [Emphasis, ours.]

Back up was then provided by supply from neighbouring Victoria.  But the load across the switches in the line supply from out-of-state was too high, and that shut down as well.

The network tried to increase the power it was getting from the interconnector (it was delivering about 525MW at the time) to over 850MW but the system was only designed to deliver a maximum of 600MW. This is what looks to have tripped the “Black System”.

That is, the out-of-state supply overloaded the system, and it automatically shut down, within half a second.  Lights out.  Right over the state.

The fundamental problem was wind power--which is notoriously unreliable.  It is unreliable in light winds.  It is unreliable in high winds.  Like Goldilocks's porridge, conditions need to be just right.  Now, of course, you can get away with it, provided you have lots of backup generation capability.  And that's what happened in South Australia.  Eventually they got the lights back on.  But how?

The report revealed that power was restored after AEMO asked ElectraNet, who owns the transmission network, to gradually power up the interconnector to Adelaide and start the gas-fired Torrens Island Power Station, which had been offline due to a planned outage.  Adelaide got its electricity back about 7pm and by midnight, 80-90 per cent of the power that could be restored had been.  [Emphasis, ours]

Yuk.  Gas-fired.  Dirty energy.  Environmentally destructive.

Wind power is a deeply flawed alternative.  It depends on capricious climatic conditions to be "just right".  It is irregular.  It is not a stable supply.  It must always be "backed up" by politically incorrect power generation.  When you factor in the cost of construction and maintenance of wind farms, together with the need to maintain costly back-up generation alternatives, the true cost of wind power is off the chart.

And that's why the state of South Australia has the most expensive power in the entire country.

Good one, greenists and global warming warriors.  You have scored a major hit there.