September 29 2016
    Canberra Times

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


Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has put Australia's renewable energy mix up for discussion as a political storm unleashed by the blackout in South Australia forced experts to insist the statewide electricity failure had "absolutely nothing" to do with that state's heavy reliance on wind power.   

Energy market analysts compared the once-in-50-years storm that lashed SA on Wednesday night to a 2003 incident in the US when a single tree branch touching an overloaded power line turned the lights off for 50 million people in the US and Canada.

Political blame game

Politicians are pointing fingers after South Australia's state wide blackout with the PM and SA Premier attributing it to unprecedented storms and the Greens on climate change. Courtesy ABC News 24.

The cascading electricity outages that resulted plunged 50 million people into darkness and became the biggest blackout in North American history but the official investigation stressed that the mother of all blackouts had been a "grid issue" not a lack of baseload power generation capacity.

As politicians, including Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and high-profile South Australian crossbencher Nick Xenophon used Wednesday's blackout to call into question the move to renewables, energy market experts dismissed any causal link to wind energy.


    Renewables questioned in wake of SA blackout

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, including a direct strike on a power station, during savage storms that brought down 22 electricity transmission poles.

"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.

South Australia's use of renewable energy faced questions following a statewide blackout on Wednesday, but experts say the there is no connection.

Bruce Mountain, director of carbon and energy markets at consultants CME said the state's power supply dipped by 40 per cent after the weather knocked out transmission lines from interstate and gas-fired generators close to Adelaide could not increase production quickly enough to make up the demand.

"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," he said.
...
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull both raised concerns with South Australia's energy infrastructure on Thursday.

By Thursday evening there was still 75,000 properties without power in SA and numerous roads closed as 120 kmh winds continued to batter the state.

The unanimous expert view of the causes of the blackout did not prevent Mr Turnbull and senior colleagues focusing on the renewable Australia-wide, with Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg directed by the Prime Minister to gather state energy ministers to discuss the supply issue.


Mr Joyce blamed South Australia's rush to renewables for the blackout, 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?"

Forty per cent of SA's electricity generation is from wind turbines.


Mr 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."


Greens energy spokesman Adam Bandt described Mr Turnbull's position as "reprehensible".

"We need more renewable energy to tackle climate change, not less," he said.

"Using a severe storm to attack renewables is a reprehensible act from a Prime Minister who should know better.   

Get real there.

The Lefty media is trying to cover up the disgraceful incompetence of the Sth Aust Labor "govt" which has embarrassed ALL Australia.

Mal is fuming. Just wait till Pauline and Malcolm R get on the case and blow it all wide open - no more cover up then.

Then non-stop disaster is normal for a Labor "Govt".

Can the coalition supporters go and get a science degree..

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?

stunspore wrote on Sep 30^th, 2016 at 5:28am:


Which science degree do you have? I'll make sure it is not that.

The_Barnacle wrote on Sep 30^th, 2016 at 5:35pm:



You mean they had no redundancy in the infrastructure?

Yup, wind power was generating about 1GWatt of power until the towers folded like wet cardboard: if anything caused the statewide blackout it is P R I V A T I S A T I O N consequent cost/corner cutting to create ever bigger profits for some HK resident using the Cayman Is because HK tax was too high.

Having said that, a nice modern nuke near Pt Augusta would be good. With a proper network the nuke plant could power most of SE Australia, meaning lots of coal fired generators could be shut down—and that would be good.

This storm was called a 1 in 50 year storm. Funny then that is was the third 1in50 storm since 1964! Maybe there is something in AGW after all? 

Redmond Neck wrote on Oct 1^st, 2016 at 7:45am:


Having redundancy cost money.
Shareholders profits will be affected if there is redundancy

Seems NSW has three networks so total outage is probably unlikely and of course more generators

https://www.aer.gov.au/consumers/making-a-complaint/who-is-my-distributor/new-so...

https://www.ausgrid.com.au/network_area