Governor Brown has California on same “dark ages” renewable energy path as South Australia
Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The entire state of South Australia suffered a complete power black out on Wednesday September 28 plugging it’s nearly 1.7 million residents, communities and businesses into darkness.
Loss of available power from transmissions lines feeding the region from other states coupled with South Australia’s ill-considered climate change energy policy of forced shutdown of the states operating coal plants to promote heavy use of renewable energy created this latest power debacle.
Last July the state barely averted energy black outs when reduced outside electrical energy supplies forced huge and costly purchases of needed power to restore electrical system reliability.(http://theconversation.com/south-australias-electricity-price-woes-are-more-due-to-gas-than-wind-62824)
The forced shutdown of operating coal plants and mandated increased use of renewables had significantly increased energy costs to consumers by eliminating production from low cost power plants while increasing use of more costly renewable energy which also requires the operation of higher cost natural gas power plants for reliability backup with these backup costs hidden from consumers. (http://www.smh.com.au/business/renewables-shift-brings-threat-to-power-supply-20160921-grl0bs.html)
The September 28 state wide black out is clearly creating challenges to the governments climate change policy initiative which is responsible for these power availability and high energy price debacles and which has jeopardized the power supply of the entire region. (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-25/sa’s-power-price-spike-sounds-national-electricity-alarm/7875970)
Unfortunately Governor Brown has California on the same path as the state of South Australia where the present and future reliability of the states power supply is dependent on huge imports of power from adjacent states which provide 1/3 of California’s electrical energy.
Unlike a decade ago where use of this imported power was driven by considerations of lowering energy costs today this imported energy is absolutely essential for sustaining the states electrical system reliability.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Here is the official statement from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO),
https://www.aemo.com.au/Media-Centre/Media-Statement-3—South-Australia-Update
“The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) advises that at 1618hrs Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on Wednesday, 28 September 2016, a severe storm damaged transmission and distribution electricity assets in South Australia, leading to a state-wide power outage. Initial investigations have identified the root cause of the event is likely to be the multiple loss of 275 kilovolt (kV) power lines during severe storm activity in the state.These transmission lines form part of the backbone of South Australia’s power system and support supply and generation north of Adelaide. The reason why a cascading failure of the remainder of the South Australia network occurred is still to be identified and is subject to further investigation.”
So there you have it,, enjoy your dose of reality…
[yes but you ignore: “The reason why a cascading failure of the remainder of the South Australia network occurred is still to be identified and is subject to further investigation.” Case not closed. /mod]
“Just under 1,000 megawatts of wind power was dispatching onto the grid at the time of the blackout with another 400 megawatts from gas plant and 300 megawatts supply from the Victorian inter-connector making up the total. Had either of the brown coal generators still been in operation the system would not have been any more resilient to this event.”
Roger Dargaville, the Deputy Director at Energy Research Institute at the University of Melbourne,
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/scientists-mostly-say-renewable-energy-is-not-guilty-over-south-australias-storm-blackout-2016-9
Matters not if not synchronous. A problem with wind.
“So why did the network go down Nick?”
As spelt out above, because it couldn’t maintain synchronisation. It was a system-initiated shutdown. A likely consequence of 22 pylons blowing over.
“your selective posting (above^^^) of 15 year old wholesale state pool pricing”
For *** sake, read it. Lil Fella said SA prices were the highest. I said, yes and so they were before wind. Wally said, not so, and so I posted 15 yo figures, specifying that they were from about 2000.
I’ll excuse your illiteracy.
I’ll see your ‘likely consequence’ and raise you an asynchronous-overload certitude.
Your 15 yr old price graph. Yes, I did actually misread your intent. To which year were you referring?
The second, third, or fourth cheapest place-holder year?
A definitive answer to the likes of Griff is probably something like this (below). Not my answer, but an engineer’s.
“It is too early provide definite analysis, but while the storm did destroy some 275 kV transmission towers serving the north of the state, that does not explain why Adelaide and the rest went down. It seems that a diminished proportion of conventional generating capacity has meant that the ancillary services of voltage and frequency control provided by these has been depleted, and when tested yesterday, failed, so that all circuits tripped out.” — Ian Hore-Lacy.
“A definitive answer to the likes of Griff…”
OK
A storm should not normally take down a whole country’s grid and South Australia is larger area than most countries. Having said that :- a single monkey took down the Kenyan electricity grid. How often we’re willing to let our grid black out depends upon how resilient we make it. South Australia let the greens destroy their grid resilience.
mark4asp said:
“A storm should not normally take down a whole country’s grid and South Australia is larger area than most countries.”
Go to google maps. Switch to earth view. Have a look at South Australia. It’s mostly desert. It only has 1.6 million people. They nearly all live in one small corner at the south east tip of the state.
It just got hit by a 1 in 50 year storm. There were tornadoes, a relatively rare occurrence in Australia.
Lets face it. The vast majority of people cheering on the claims that this was the result of renewable energy policy could write everything they know about South Australia, this storm, and the layout and design of the grid there, on the back of a postage stamp. A small one.
One good thing that will come out of this – with all due sympathy for those in SA who suffered from the blackout – is that there will be a full enquiry into the circumstances. We can only hope that – even allowing for politicians to put their own special spin on the outcome – the technical facts of the matter will not be able to be suppressed and some sensible conclusions can be drawn from them.
My hope is that it will become clear that there is a maximum practical limit for the proportion of renewables that can be included in a grid if it is to be stable and reliable under all but extreme circumstances. The messy effects of the variable voltage and frequency of wind, and of local neighbourhood grid difficulties caused by solar installations feeding input into a system that was designed for output, are such that all sensible authorities will call a halt to their enthusiasm for intermittent renewable feeds. (Yeah, I’m a dreamer, I know.)
Those who are unclear about the need for frequency and voltage stability in our supply should watch this Youtube clip about the British national grid and the “East Enders effect”.
As a popular TV soap finishes, 1,500,000 kettles are switched on within a couple of minutes (to make tea, obviously), and the grid has to suddenly find another 3GW, which comes from the under-Channel French interconnect (nice clean reliable nuclear power) and a pumped storage hydro in Wales.
Here’s a similar account, Bob, of how the grid deals when everyone switches on after ‘Strictly’ (You should have this in the US – a show where ex-govt members do ballroom dancing!)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/20/strictly-come-dancing-bbc-national-grid
but read down to the end where head of electricity systems operations at the National Grid explains that its just as easy to handle load changes from renewables…
He also says “”I don’t see an upper limit to how much wind we can accommodate [on the grid]”, says Williams, who also notes that 86% of payments to companies to stop generating when the grid is getting overloaded go to coal and gas, not wind”
and
“described the recent warnings of blackouts made by energy company bosses as scaremongering. “We have always had periods when there is a bit of a crunch and we have managed that,” he says. “People talk about winters of discontent and blackouts, but what we are talking about in the worst-case scenario is a few half-hour periods a year. It’s most likely we’d reduce the frequency a bit, so lights would dim a little and hairdryers would be a little less hot. Most people would not notice.” “
Still relying on the Gaurdian Griff? lol
Yes it’s certainly kicked up a political $#*+storm looking for answers-
http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/south-australias-storm-blackout-has-turned-into-a-really-ugly-fight-over-renewable-energy/ar-BBwLZ33?li=AA4RE4&ocid=spartandhp
and if the wind up north was strong enough to blow down transmission lines, London to a brick it was more than strong enough to see the wind farms up north shut down automatically and destabilise the grid but we’ll see.
The other side of the unreliables coin is solar and that’s been forgotten in all the hue and cry, so with a 2100W solar feed in system on my garage roof and the inverter readout inside I happened to be working inside that day and can report that at midday, overcast and raining, it was putting out a grand total of 55watts and the story would have been the same right across the metro area and much of the State. Furthermore just before the blackout before 4pm it had shut down completely due to not enough solar insolation as the sun sinks above all that cloud. When you own one of these reshiftable power bill units due to the ridiculous 54c/kwhr the Gummint has mandated lucky owners should be anointed with, you know how useless and unreliable solar power is without the ability to store it and deliver it when it’s really needed. Bear in mind here SA is an ideal Mediterranean climate and that sort of shutdown throughout winter and on wet overcast days when folks are beginning to knock off work for the peak evening power consumption period, says it all.
Whatever the final outcome of the cause/s of the SA blackout, it has at last made lots of ignorant folks recognise that their lifestyle at the flick of a switch doesn’t run on emotion but rational, scientific maths, physics and chemistry. I can tell you it’s come as quite a shock to a few and I’m enjoying their light bulb moment immensely.
A man for all seasons is our Senator X, who was a big fan of ‘renewables’ before the State blackout but is now a convert to ‘base load renewables’ it seems-
‘Independent South Australian senator Nick Xenophon also attempted to link the blackout to renewable energy, saying “This has not been sensible, it has been reckless — we have relied too much on wind rather than base load renewables”.’
Some people are going to be very upset about this loss of power in South Australia. A fertility clinic has lost all of their embryos due to the power failure, and their generator which failed afterwards. Although, how can an institute such as a fertility clinic be so careless as to not know the state of their backup equipment? …http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/sa-weather-embryos-destroyed-at-flinders-medical-centre-after-generator-fails-in-blackout/525107
what a joke SA is…the ONLY way to ensure industry has uninterrupted power supply is through coal fired power stations. Alinta had to close its Port Augusta power station due to squeezed margins-little wonder cause the pollies made it too hard for them to operate. Instead the pollies gave into the greens (hypocrits) for green energy…pfft. The consumer is paying more for greener power cause they’re subsidising the transition-a massive con job. Meanwhile the community of Leigh Creek will become a ghost town, the workers may get other jobs-where, anyone knows?, & Port Augusta has many numbers without a job with the power station shutting. SA politicians are societal & economic vandals & utterly clueless. Why would you import power when you have the capacity to make it? Goodness me it does not make sense at all. SA with the car industry shut down & now this farce must ask itself (electorate) did we deserve this? Well you voted these incompetent parasites in so I guess you do. Ash Sarah Hanson Young what the Greens propose to fix the power problem, the states dire economic situation & job creation strategy! More political hyperbole on her part for sure but no substance. Better move interstate cause you’ll end up living in a cave (thats what the poliies want after all). Think about it……..
Where the transmission lines, managed by ElectraNet, came down is south of Port Augusta. In May this year South Australia closed its last coal-power station at the port. If those coal-power stations were still operating, they still would have dropped offline and seen the cascading failure that tripped the generations. Having those thermal generators there wouldn’t have helped at all.
The engineering report identified this very vulnerability earlier in the year. Here’s the full report: https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Security-and-reliability/-/media/CACEB2122362436DAC2CDD6E8D3E70D0.ashx
The points are quite simple:
– the stability of the grid, especially frequency-wise, requires either continuous connection to out-of-State synchronous generation OR substantial in-State synchronous generation contributions.
– frequency fluctuations cause auto-load-shedding and ‘islanding’ of entire grid sections in order to protect that all-important consistency of frequency
– a grid cannot be started from asynch sources. Sync has to be spun up and stable before async can be carefully re-introduced, and if care is not taken in this process, the auto-shedding system simply trips out the culprits once more.
– too many fluctuations can ‘ring’ up and down the grid as shutdowns themselves cause fluctuations, which cause further trip-outs. This is the classic cascade.
– the report identifies re “Over frequency generation shedding (OFGS)
A non-credible contingency event that trips both circuits of the Heywood Interconnector at times when there is high export from SA to Victoria is very unlikely, but would result in a rise in frequency within the SA power system and potentially lead to uncoordinated loss of generation. At present there is no specific emergency control scheme in place to maintain frequency within the FOS followings such an event. ”
Of course, the non-credible contingency event occurred – the technical term is, I believe Murphy’s Law.
The situation SA finds itself in is that populist roll-out of renewables via incentives, subsidies etc., has quite simply out-paced the capabilities of the electrical ecosystem considered as a whole.
Failure to consider all aspects of an ecosystem is something the greenish have always warned against….
No no you’re conflating things and we just need this woman’s solution that’s all-
“It is true that SA doesn’t have baseload power — we no longer have coal, we don’t have hydro, and nuclear is a glow-in-the-dark dream — and renewables are a more unreliable source.
But the political chatter around ‘baseload’ is too often constricted to a narrow range of options. It is a code word for slowing the switch to renewables and keeping faithful ol’ coal on the go.
There are still plenty of questions to be answered. Why such a critical piece of infrastructure failed and what we have to do to stop it happening again. Why the whole state became a national joke, languishing in the darkness. Why someone I know had to desperately find a generator for a woman on a ventilator; why phones failed.
Once we know all those answers, though, we need a solution and that solution is not to step backwards from renewables, but to work out how to make them work better. Because it is possible to get baseload from renewables; or it will be one day once the storage technology catches up.”
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/tory-shepherd-federal-government-using-sa-blackout-to-prod-debate-over-renewable-energy/news-story/fb756bf99f54d7beba2c5212888122e8
Thank you Wayne, & there you have it. The network has evolved with critically decreased robustness as a direct consequence of move to asynchronous generation along with loss of synchronous system inertia at strategic points within the network. Although major events are few, in the past (early 2000’s), SA has recovered quickly from load shedding of up to 1100MW!
The pylons had good reason to fall over but the grid was preordained to fail.
I did think William’s suggestion in the comments section said it best Prime Minister-
“Just subsidize battery back up to rooftop solar and this issue for most of us just disappears. My entire extended family would go off grid tomorrow and there would be millions like us. Who needs your network, not us. Come on innovation PM get with technology and solve the issue”
and howsabout a free Tesla sports car for me while you’re about it PM?
“23 towers in five locations, affecting three major power lines, were lying on the ground, ripped out by the storm.
As Simon Emms from Electranet made clear on Thursday, when you take more than 700MW of generation out of the system in a matter of seconds, no grid that he knew of could have kept going..”
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/uhlmanns-bizarre-prediction-of-national-blackout-if-we-pursue-wind-and-solar-39364
A surprisingly large number of grid blackouts are not caused by storms.
This article: SA Blackout – The questions for the regulators, contradicts windmill apologists:
Delayed reaction….
Australian government wants slower switch to clean energy
https://www.yahoo.com/news/australian-state-loses-power-strong-storm-lashes-region-094831101.html?ref=gs
The state power operator says renewables not the issue in the second sentence of that article.
Clearly the government is taking a premature stand. A wee bit of investigation would be helpful. Too late to stop the article above or the thousands of wasted words beneath.
A report on SA electricity by AEMO says such a large amount of wind power should work provided SA keeps either large the interconnectors to Victoria and/or large scale conventional plant like hydro/coal/nuclear/gas. SA tried to do away with the large scale conventional plant.
https://twitter.com/Oz_Mark/status/782084495608467456
The Eastern states like NSW and Queensland have had storms and power outages but never a whole state. The storms were only part of the problem, the other part being green ideology that does not take into account technical limitations.
And in 2016 they’ve got even more concerns-
“5. CLOSURE OF NORTHERN POWER STATION
The Northern Power Station (NPS) performs an important transmission network voltage control service at the Davenport 275 kV substation in the Upper North of SA. Closure of NPS will remove this voltage control service.
ElectraNet initiated system studies to identify potential network adequacy and security limitations resulting from the withdrawal of NPS. Those studies, and a review of past operational experience, have revealed the following limitations under certain credible demand and generation scenarios:
Reactive power margin – at times of high Olympic Dam demand, moderate to high system demand, and low wind generation in the Mid North of SA, reactive power reserve margins may not be met at the Davenport 275 kV connection point.
Over voltage – operating the Davenport 275 kV connection point voltage above 1.05 pu (which occurs for the majority of the time to mitigate against the risk of voltage collapse at Olympic Dam) is expected to result in over-voltage at times of low wind generation in the Mid North of SA for the loss of the Olympic Dam load.
Voltage collapse – for N-1-135 conditions the system would be at risk of voltage collapse for certain operating conditions. Further, switching a 50 MVAr reactor into service at Davenport at times of low wind generation in the Mid North of SA may cause a voltage collapse.
Reduced wind farm output – the combined output of the two Eyre Peninsula wind farms is reduced by 20 MW (by way of an intra-regional generation dispatch limit) when NPS is not in service.
ElectraNet analysis shows that the withdrawal of NPS will create challenges for transmission network voltage control in the Upper North and the Eyre Peninsula regions of SA. These challenges will arise for a range of system demand levels at times of low wind generation in the Mid North of SA, and also for any N-1 condition in the Upper North.”
https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Security-and-reliability/-/media/CACEB2122362436DAC2CDD6E8D3E70D0.ashx
“Plugging”? Should be “plunging”.
Except that the storm forced all that local state wind power to be shut down, whereas coal would have continued working.