Performance of wind farms and fossil fuel powered generators analysed
Guest essay by Tom Quirk
It looks like a natural disaster but brought on by the fragility of the South Australian power system caused by the size of the variations in wind power.
The failure is most likely to have been triggered by the violent fluctuations from the Snowtown wind farms (Figure 1 and 5). Shortly after 3 pm there was a loss of 200MW with a partial recovery some twenty minutes later of 100MW. The total wind farm supply for South Australia also shows these variations (Figure 2).
This would have put a shock to the system for frequency stability at 50 cycles per second. For most of the day the local gas fired generators were only supplying 100 MW (Figure 3) with the balance to match demand with supply coming from Victoria. But the local generators started to increase and vary their output with first a 150 MW loss at Snowtown just before mid-day and then 50 MW variations that followed. Shortly before 3 pm the Hallett wind farms lost and then recovered 70 MW in a 20 minute interval (Figure 4 and 6). This added to the final Snowtown wind farm 200 MW loss. This detail is shown in Figure 5.
So the system instability could trigger Victoria shutting off the link to South Australia and the blackout followed.
The physical network may not be very robust as can be seen in images of broken pylons. Transmission lines are expensive at $1 to $3 million per km. Each wind farm must be connected to deliver maximum power to the network even though its average performance might be only 33% of maximum so connection costs may have been held to a minimum..
The trouble was north of Adelaide so could it have been isolated with the remaining network continuing or was so much power coming from the north that a blackout would follow no matter what was done
..
Figure 1 Snowtown `1 2 3 150 km north of Adelaide
Figure 2 Total South Australian wind farm production
Figure 3 Total fossil fuel supply from gas turbines (and diesel?) generators
Figure 4 Hallett 1 2 150 km north of Adelaide
Figure 5 Snowtown wind farms Data source AEMO
Figure 6 Hallett wind farms Data source AEMO
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So, let me get this straight; CAGW is going to make storms more intense and frequent, so the solution is to replace all the sturdy gas, coal, and nuclear plants with fragile windmills and solar panels?
Yep Tim ‘no rain to fill dams’ Flannery has had an epiphany at the Climate Council with a warmer wetter world nowadays-
“Did climate change have something to do with it?
Climate change is fuelling more frequent and severe extreme weather events, including storms.
The storm that hit South Australia yesterday occurred in a wetter and warmer atmosphere, and it’s likely that these conditions are escalating the intensity of our storms. These wetter and warmer conditions are being driven by climate change.”
http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/myth-busting-sa-storms
Climate Séance is like that as you know. You get up in the morning look out the window or flick on the weather report and then relate it all to climate change for your palls in the meeja.
Yes, Paul – that’s the plan, along with making electricity so expensive noone will be able to run airconditioning to help cope with the blistering heat. It hasn’t occurred to the goofy green blob that it’s cheap energy that makes extreme weather survivable for us.
Psycho anarchist Demagoguery Party here wants to get rid of air conditioners. I guess we are all supposed to move to the beach. But they want to get rid of refrigeration as well, so it is rotten food for the masses.
Donald,
I ‘spose we could start with Hillary’s and move on from there. What was it that caused her “Fainting Attack” – Oh yes, overheating wasn’t it.
/cheeky
The new slogan for renewables is “Thar she doesn’t blow, oh no.”
‘Call me Ishmael.’ The hunting of the great white elephants.
Well, if this is the new normal for that area, it’s not difficult to predict what will happen. What would you do if you lived there? Buy your own back-up generator, of course, and have a small stockpile of appropriate fossil fuel. Hospitals already have them. Government buildings would soon purchase them (can’t have politicians sitting in the cold and dark). Then businesses, universities, arenas, etc. Before long, generators would be as common as central hvac systems.
Then researchers can study how much additional CO2 is released every time there is a problem, and perhaps propose that CO2 levels could be reduced if the government built NG power plants to carry the baseload and stabilize the grid.
What’s wrong with a bit of intelligent management? BOM, with their radar and satellite data knew where the high winds were and where they were heading. All wind farms in the likely storm path should have been closed down and the output picked up by gas stations, all done quietly and purely as routine operations!
The greens should be happy, SA emulating North Korea, both would have had the same black hole look from space.
Predictably the Guardian is quick to serve up its reflexive squirt of verbal diarrhoea:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/29/south-australia-blackout-explained-renewables-not-to-blame
And equally predictably, they’re wrong.
In February this year I waited 5 hours in the Royal Adelaide Hospital waiting for treatment for a throat infection that was obstructing my breathing. Then I gave up and walked back to the hotel. But I have to confess that I read with a peculiar satisfaction (and not much surprise) that the RAH was the one hospital whose power backup failed and went entirely without electricity during the blackout.
With green-stupid energy policy on the rise everywhere, this feast of schadenfreude is just beginning.
With green-stupid energy policy on the rise everywhere, this feast of schadenfreude is just beginning.
Exactly. Wind power generation is proportional to the cube of the respective windspeed (v**3) which will create huge variabilities when there are huge speed variations.
The greens fall back in pretending that with more turbines the variances are distributed and therefore in average we have less not more problems the more turbines are there.
The reality is that wind is mostly consistent over large areas, it is not a huge storm here and peace 100 meters away. This creates huge zones of variability with bursts of power as the graphic shows. Imagine the horror of the other power supply to compensate for that mess.
One can control and steer the turbines, but there are limits to it. In addition the producers are greedy and would like to get max produced even if it creates problems in other areas, especially with the ‘green’-distribution priority.
I imagine it is not without reason that the germans announced recently the population to prepare backup food and water for 10 days at home. There seem to be that ‘some people’ expect there will be more power supply failures and more often.
https://blog.udemy.com/disadvantages-of-wind-energy/
Repeated from the thread at
http://joannenova.com.au/2016/09/the-south-australian-black-out-a-state-running-without-enough-thermal-reserve-to-cope-with-contingencies/
“Hmm.
From above and some mine
Suggestions for the renaming of the SA political establishment so far
Premier – Mr Ill-weather or Mr Weather-ill or Mr Weather-dill
Party (with windmills to the fore and good Irish tradition) – fron Australian Labor Party to
Fianna Flail
Yes, excellent case of nominative determinism but nobody beats our (former) Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge.
Interesting article, I am not against the right type of renewables in the right place, but they are a mature enough industry now to meet the basic requirements of providing low cost and secure energy.
However, what struck me the most is the sheer complexity of trying to balance varying amounts of renewable power from a variety of sources against the prevalent base load. The technology to do this must be very involved so I hope they are suitably protected against cyber terrorism, as this sort of system is just the sort I would seek to attack if I were part of a terroris* group intent on disabling society. Without power you have nothing
tonyb
You don’t need hacking skills to destroy a grid.
A couple well placed bombs along multiple transmission lines detonated simultaneously will cause far more damage and take longer to fix.
Bombs? A simple bicycle thrown in to a substation will do same.
“However, what struck me the most is the sheer complexity of trying to balance varying amounts of renewable power from a variety of sources against the prevalent base load.”
Yes I got that too and now understand why the SA experiment has produced among the most expensive power prices in Australia and the world. Beware all ye who enter here, although perhaps you’ve all noticed the reduction in global warming due to our selfless sacrifice? No? Ah well perhaps only the good citizens of Perth then-
http://joannenova.com.au/2016/10/coldest-perth-september-recorded-in-120-years-of-records/
Skeptics, who predicted that climate change obsessed power generation would not work in the real world, are proven correct again
Forget about butterflies of West Africa or Brazil, it is butterflies of Ethiopia.
BBC Weather’s Tomasz Schafernaker takes a look at the formation of Cape Verde-type hurricanes and where their energy comes from.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/24056514
In the end renewable energy will make energy unaffordable for ‘We The Taxpayer’ who paid for it. I suppose that’s their goal.
http://www.dw.com/en/germany-ratifies-paris-climate-agreement/a-19570247
Black outs are coming to Germany…
Pylons can fall (there can always be unusual weather events) but grids should able to cope. That the whole South Australian grid blacked out is due to lack of synchronous inertia being online at the time when the Heywood interconnector to Victoria was lost (this itself was due to the lack of online synchronous inertia). Portions of the grid where the pylons collapsed should have been isolated and blacked out but the grid as a whole should have coped, especially since most of South Australia’s thermal generators are located quite close to Adelaide (nowhere near any of the pylon collapses).
The windfarms did not directly cause the blackout but they did set the operating conditions through the effect of their price subsidies which led to the blackout.
The renewable crowd are using the fallen pylons as an excuse to demonstrate the fragility of traditional power grids so they can spruik batteries and PV and microgrids. It’s all a smokescreen tactic so don’t fall for it – pylons can fall but grids should able to cope.
This very serious problem was been known for a long time – since at least 2005 and probably for decades.
There was a near-grid crash in Germany due to wind power on Christmas Eve, 2004, as cited in my post below from circa 2005.
Naturally, our imbecilic politicians cannot grasp this simple concept: “The wind does not blow all the time.”
Some of them believe that grid-scale storage is a current solution – it is not.
Imagine if the grid actually crashed at Christmas in Germany, instead of a near-miss. It would have been a disaster, costing billions due to frozen pipes, etc., and much human suffering.
Imagine if that happened in a colder country, like Canada, or the northern USA.
Source: Wind Report 2005, by E.On Netz, then the largest wind power generator in the world.
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf
**************************
My post from circa 2005 follows:
Here is a quotation from Wind Report 2005 by E.On Netz for the German wind power grid. As you can readily surmise, wind power is a huge problem for grid operators.
Within just two days, the entire generating capacity of German wind power disappeared, necessitating the startup of the equivalent of TWELVE 500 megawatt coal-fired power plants.
During the steepest drop on December 24, 2004, they lost the equivalent of one 500MW power plant every 30 minutes!
The truth is that wind power requires 100% backup from conventional power sources, a duplication of resources that makes wind power entirely uneconomic.
The feed-in capacity can change frequently within a few hours. This is shown in FIGURE 6, which reproduces the course of wind power feedin during the Christmas week from 20 to 26 December 2004.
“Whilst wind power feed-in at 9.15am on Christmas Eve reached its maximum for the year at 6,024MW, it fell to below 2,000MW within only 10 hours, a difference of over 4,000MW. This corresponds to the capacity of 8 x 500MW coal fired power station blocks. On Boxing Day, wind power feed-in in the E.ON grid fell to below 40MW.
Handling such significant differences in feed-in levels poses a major challenge to grid operators.”
Yes, AEMO data shows that even if you add Vic and SA together the total output can go from under 200 MW to 2200 MW within a couple of days.
http://energy.anero.id.au/wind-energy/2016/september
( click on MW button and deselect the other states’ checkboxes at the bottom.)
A 3 to 4 day ramping from near zero to near max where the max peaks are typically 60%-80% of the boiler plate rated value. So Allan’s comment about needing 100% back up capacity seems pretty fair.
Sounds like an engineering nightmare. However, if we can keep a nuclear reaction in criticality without it getting out of control ( most of the time ) I guess we should be able to keep the grid from falling on its arse.
My guess is that engineering requirements have been over-ridden for economic constraints and quite likely some mismanagement of the backup capacity which does not seem to have been ready to roll despite ample warning of arrival of a major storm.
Like cloud seeding Tassie just a day or two before a major storm hit and thus exacerbating the ensuing flooding, it seems like good old fashioned incompetence is also a player.
There will be months of manoeuvring and buck passing of this one. Should be interesting.
For Allan MacRae: re
“The truth is that wind power requires 100% backup from conventional power sources, a duplication of resources that makes wind power entirely uneconomic.”
No. The truth is that ALL energy supplies require 100 percent backup. Just ask California when two nuclear reactors at San Onofre were shut down, dropping 2200 MW off the grid. And again, when more than 900 MW of nuclear power in Phoenix, Arizona (that flows to Southern California) is taken offline for various reasons.
Wind power is economic where the wind resources are sufficient, and installation costs are reasonable. In the Great Plains of the USA, wind resources are very good and installed costs are low; this yields a reasonable return on investment when the wind power plant obtains $43 per MWh (US dollars). At this time, $20 per MWh is provided by the utility purchasing the power, and $23 per MWh is provided as a tax credit on federal taxes.
A recent report on 2015 data, “2015 Wind Technologies Market Report” from DoE, shows that wind in the US is more than economic:
o Installed cost in the windy Great Plains is $1,640 / kW, continuing the downward trend of the past several years.
o Also, wind power is sold at very low prices under a Purchase Power Agreement, for $20 / MWh. The federal tax credit continues at $23 per MWh.
o Finally, annual average capacity factors for 2015 are higher than ever, at 41.2 percent among projects built in 2014.
The statement that wind power is entirely uneconomic is blatantly false.
You forgot the sarc tag.
The federal tax credit continues at $23 per MWh.
Only your Roger, could claim that wind is economic while noting that over half its revenue comes from tax credits.
No. The truth is that ALL energy supplies require 100 percent backup.
Once again with the contrived misdirection. Operating a grid where large power plants may go off line does in fact require backup sources to maintain service. But they go off line over large periods of time, and when they come back, they are stable. But this is an entirely different matter from wind power which is unstable WHILE OPERATING,on a second to second basis and forces all other power sources connected to the grid to compensate for the instability of wind, and your false economics don’t even begin to take into account the huge costs to that infrastructure.
What are the differences between 100% standby backup, reserve margin, and capacity shortfall due to extraordinary non-repeating outages. None?
Nonsense Roger.
In Southern Alberta, we have some of the most consistent winds on the planet, due to the Crow’s Nest Pass, a gap in the Rocky Mountains to the west. Wind power is paid 20 cents/KWh and receives this 24/7, even when the wind power is not needed – then we give the power to neighbouring states for free. Reliable coal or gas-fired power typically gets 2 to 4 cents per KWh. Do the math.
Re backup, see below. Substitution Capacity is the key factor, and it is probably about 5% in Germany in 2016. That means they have to install 20 units of wind power to permanently replace 1 unit of coal or gas-fired power. The economics are dismal.
Regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/27/exxon-stands-up-to-the-green-bullies/comment-page-1/#comment-2154602
[excerpt]
On Grid-Connected Wind and Solar Power:
Wind Power is what warmists typically embrace – trillions of dollars have been squandered on worthless grid-connected wind power schemes that require life-of-project subsidies and drive up energy costs.
Some background on grid-connected wind power schemes:
The Capacity Factor of wind power is typically a bit over 20%, but that is NOT the relevant factor.
The real truth is told by the Substitution Capacity, which is dropping to as low as 4% in Germany – that is the amount of conventional generation that can be permanently retired when wind power is installed into the grid.
The E.ON Netz Wind Report 2005 is an informative document:
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf
(apparently no longer available from E.ON Netz website).
Figure 6 says Wind Power is too intermittent (and needs almost 100% spinning backup);
and
Figure 7 says it just gets worse and worse the more Wind Power you add to the grid (see Substitution Capacity dropping from 8% to 4%).
The same story applies to grid-connected Solar Power (both in the absence of a “Super-Battery”).
This was obvious to us decades ago.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/17/americas-first-offshore-wind-farm-is-nearly-ready-get-ready-for-euro-sized-electricity-bills/#comment-2280513
Above is an excerpt from previous post on land-based wind power.
The real issue is not Capacity Factor – it is Substitution Capacity, due to intermittency.
Forcing expensive intermittent wind and solar power into the grid ahead of less expensive reliable (and dispatchable) power from gas turbine generators is part of the game to artificially bias the alleged economics in favour of wind and solar power. Without this charade, wind and solar power would cost much more than is alleged.
The concept of forcing non-dispatchable wind power into the grid while idling much cheaper dispatchable power is simply a way to fool and defraud the public.
Regards, Allan
It got worse. In October 2008, wind power in Germany fell from 16GW to 2GW inside 12 hours.
Allan M.R. MacRae:
I won’t hold my breath waiting for Nick Stokes to come along and rebut (let alone refute) that statement.
The refutation is simple: the aim is not be “economic”. False premise.
The aim is to “save the planet” from carbon based life forms. The only good carbon is dead carbon : “keep it in the ground”.
Silicon based power is cool. I guess the agenda is being secretly pushed by some silicon based life forms that are trying to take over our planet. 😉
Thermalization explains why CO2 has no significant effect on climate http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com
The fallacy of wind turbines is revealed with simple arithmetic.
5 mW wind turbine, avg output 1/3 nameplate, 20 yr life, electricity @ur momisugly wholesale 3 cents per kwh produces $8.8E6.
Installed cost @ur momisugly $1.7E6/mW = $8.5E6. Add the cost of standby CCGT for low wind periods. Add the cost of land lease, maintenance, administration.
Solar voltaic and solar thermal are even worse.
The dollar relation is a proxy for energy relation. Bottom line, the energy consumed to design, manufacture, install, maintain and administer renewables appears to exceed the energy they produce in their lifetime. Without the energy provided by other sources these renewables could not exist.
No. See my reply earlier to Allan MacRae for the correct wind power economics.
The one where you admitted that over half the revenue to wind power comes from tax credits? See my reply to your reply.
RS – A typical error in an assessment is failing to realize that installed cost per mW uses nameplate power while average delivered power is much lower (capacity factor approx 40%).
Wind power can not be used to back up wind power because there may be no wind at the backup either. Nuc and coal plants can’t be used for backup for wind because they take days to bring up to power. Wind turbines are an unpredictable nuisance to power management.
The profoundly relevant factor is energy Wind turbine installations consume about as much as they produce. Investment ends when the subsidy (thanks to our misguided politicians) ends.
Pangburn says: ” Wind turbine installations consume about as much as they produce.”
…
Can Pangburn explain this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/business/energy-environment/a-texas-utility-offers-a-nighttime-special-free-electricity.html?_r=0
RG – The subject is energy. “Wind turbine installations consume about as much [energy] as they produce [in their lifetime]. The article you refer to is not relevant.
Richard Baguley on October 2, 2016 at 1:45 pm
Noone needs that small amount of energy, most is lost in transport. The blades rotate to get the subsidies money machine going.
Boys, this is why free markets are good.
If this were a free market, the companies would pay for their failure to provide the product as advertised. In a socialist system, the failures will just get more money.
All these people arguing. A waste of time. Failures have to go away.
For a similar reaction, look at the financial fiasco of the ACA in the United States and reflect.
Remember, the Soviet Union collapsed from its economic backwardness. So did the Ottoman Empire. People never learn.
It is noteworthy that California has much more wind power installed (8,000 MW) than does South Australia, also has strong storms, and also is connected to other grids. Yet, California has not had a wind-related power blackout.
The document linked below has good information that should be more than a bit instructive to the nay-sayers of renewable energy. The title is a rather imposing: “2013 Special Reliability Assessment: Maintaining Bulk Power System Reliability While Integrating Variable Energy Resources – CAISO Approach A joint report produced by: the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the California Independent System Operator Corporation November 2013”
http://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/ra/Reliability%20Assessments%20DL/NERC-CAISO_VG_Assessment_Final.pdf (note: 1.7 MB, 53 pages)
Where a technology is implemented successfully in some locations, but fails in another location, one must not blame the technology. The place to look is at the designers and system operators that failed to account for significant and material factors that led to the failure.
You are wrong, because it is penetration that matters for reliability. Unless a grid has easy flex sunchronous generation (e.g. ontario hydro), penetration beyond 10-15% is very risky. That is because most grids operate on 10-15% spinning reserve margin to insure sufficient grid inertia tommaintain frequency. (When load increases, a generator wants to slow down. The inertia of large rotating generator mass buffers this until more power is added.) California wind plus solar is 12.3 percent penetration, so wind bynitself is under 10%. SA wind is ~40%. Wind provides little to no grid inertia depending on turbine type.
As detailed analysis from grid engineers is showing, it was not the loss of transmission pylons that caused the statewide blackout. (That would have been local blackout and contained.) It was high wind caused automatic wind turbine tripouts and feathering as easily seen by Snowtown. There simply wasn’t enough grid inertia to maintain frequency. The off line gas units could not spin up fast enough, so the Haywood interconnector tripped off to protect the Victoria generators, and that tripped everything else in SA off automatically. Classic rapid cascading blackout. To have 40 percent wind knowing that high winds would force some turbines to feather, without having 20-30% spinning reserve was just asking for trouble. And OCGT isn’t really spinning reserve, especially when switched off. Basically the spinning reseve was the ~500Mw from the interconnectors, compared to a load of >1100 Mw. Just nuts. And SA had been warned about it in writing in February.
Roger Sowell;
Where a technology is implemented successfully in some locations, but fails in another location, one must not blame the technology.
And yet Roger, Mr. Anti-Nuclear-Activist-Extraordinaire, that is precisely what you do in your arguments against nuclear power.
..+ 1,000 gold stars…
He’s such an easy target …
… lookout, incoming!
California is also big enough to bully power suppliers, such as British Columbia whicho helped keep the lights on during the 1998 brownouts, for cheap prices after the sale. Despite winning against California’s $3+ billion lawsuit at every level until the last, BC settled for $750,000,000 (as the alternative of losing to a state with many more lawyers than all of Canada) to avoid a possible judgement costing every man, woman and child in BC nearly $1000.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-hydro-transalta-owe-california-millions-us-judge-rules/article8944884/
Roger,
You ignore the relative sizes of the Californian vs Sth Australian grids. 8,000 MW is about double the installed Sth Aust wind capacity whereas population and, even more, demand is about 15 times. Also California has much more connection to other grids than the 2 interconnectors in Sth Aust. It should be obvious from this that California has not yet reached the degree of vulnerability that Sth Aust has just seen.
I am a structural engineer and I am surprised that 22 transmission towers collapsed during a 1-in-50 year wind storm. This is very unusual – buildings and other structures in Australia are normally designed to resist a 1-in-1,000 year wind event. I can only suggest that there were other contributory factors (additional to wind) that caused so many collapses.
There were reports of tornados. The BOM’s wind records may not show these isolated extremes if they don’t blow over a gauge.
“The failure is most likely to have been triggered by the violent fluctuations from the Snowtown wind farms2
NO IT WAS NOT!
“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
“So, what did cause South Australia’s blackout?
Was it because of wind or wind turbines?
It has everything to do with wind – because that’s what blew over the transmission lines. But it has nothing to do with South Australia’s wind turbines.
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.
A lot of generation capacity was lost because of the transmission failure. Because of that there was a voltage drop, which triggered safety protection measures that tripped the Haywood inter-connector that connects South Australia with Victoria. This could have happened in any state or with any generation technology.”
http://theconversation.com/what-caused-south-australias-state-wide-blackout-66268
Unfortunately for Griff, the people writing for The Conversation had not read the AEMO Preliminary Report on the Blackout, which was published two days later. It was clear that faults occurred on transmission lines. Single phase faults occurred and the lines were disconnected, then they came back on line. When a double phase fault occurred the line was shut down. Electranet safety procedures require the line to be checked before resuming operation.
A transmission tower falling would have meant a three phase fault to earth – none occurred before the first four wind farms went off line together. This is easily explained by a gust of wind causing all four close by farms to suddenly shut down. This lost 123 MW from the system. Six seconds later another two farms in the general area also shut down, losing another 192 MW. Total 315 MW lost. The Heywood Interconnector had been delivering about 500 MW, then the lost generation from the first set of farms was replaced by the Heywood connector, where the flow increased to about 700 MW.
After the second set shut down, the flow wildly fluctuated, rising to nearly 900 MW, then decreasing. When the SA frequency dropped (near constant load, substantially reduced supply) the interconnector lines tripped, and point two seconds later the entire SA system shut down.
Had there been more thermal power stations on line, and fewer wind farms, it is plausible that the stability from the thermal stations would have enabled them to withstand the sudden loss of power. Had the interconnector been rated for 1200 MW instead of 600 MW, it could probably have withstood the loss as Victoria would have provided the power – albeit the frequency over the grid would have dropped further from the 49.85 Hz it was operating at.
Had the SA system been provided with selective “load shedding” trips, it is plausible that sufficient load would have been dropped off when the wind farms shut down that the interconnector flow would not have risen so far, and its trips would not have operated. Remember ‘load shedding’ was standard practice in the UK when the power demand got too great. First frequency was reduced, so that the grid ran at, perhaps, 48 Hz during the day, made up by running at 51 Hz during the night, but if things got too bad selected areas were shut down, so that housing suddenly lost power, while trains, trams and trolleybuses, and hospitals and the like kept going. Candles were a standard household item as one neven knew when one would be affected by ‘load shedding’.
Why is the Excess Winter Mortality Rate so high in Australia? Has this anything to do with their very high costs of energy? Or is it the failure to adapt to cold weather in a warm country. Winter Mortality Rates are lower in Canada and the Scandinavian countries than in Australia.
https://friendsofsciencecalgary.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/cold-weather-kills-macrae-daleo-4sept2015-final.pdf
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150112110820.htm
January 12, 2015
Australians are more likely to die during unseasonably cold winters than hotter than average summers, QUT research has found.
Across the country severe winters that are colder and drier than normal are a far bigger risk to health than sweltering summers that are hotter than average.
QUT Associate Professor Adrian Barnett, a statistician with the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation and the lead researcher of the study, said death rates in Australian cities were up to 30 per cent higher in winter than summer.
Annual Capacity Factor in land-based wind power systems rarely exceeds 30% and is often about 20%.
Capacity Factor in the large E.ON Netz system in Germany in 2004 was 18% (=1295/7050).
Source: E.On Netz Wind Report 2005
https://docs.wind-watch.org/eonwindreport2005.pdf
“At the end of 2004, wind farms with a total installed capacity of around 7,050MW were connected in the E.ON Netz control area, accounting for 43% of total installed wind power capacity in Germany.
FIGURE 5 shows the annual curve of wind power feed-in in the E.ON control area for 2004, from which it is possible to derive the wind power
feed-in during the past year:
1. The highest wind power feed-in in the E.ON grid was just above 6,000MW for a brief period, or put another way the feed-in was around 85% of the installed wind power capacity at the time.
2. The average feed-in over the year was 1,295MW, around one fifth of the average installed wind power capacity over the year.
3. Over half of the year, the wind power feed-in was less than 14% of the average installed wind power capacity over the year.
As stated previously, the more important factor is Substitution Capacity, which is the amount of conventional power generation that can be permanently replaced by wind power. This factor was 8% in Germany in 2004, and is projected to drop to 4% in Germany by 2020.
“In order to also guarantee reliable electricity supplies when wind farms produce little or no power, e.g. during periods of calm or storm-related shutdowns, traditional power station capacities must be available as a reserve. This means that wind farms can only replace traditional power station capacities to a limited degree. An objective measure of the extent to which wind farms are able to replace traditional power stations, is the contribution towards guaranteed capacity which they make within an existing power station portfolio. Approximately this capacity may be dispensed within a traditional power station portfolio, without thereby prejudicing the level of supply reliability.
In 2004 two major German studies investigated the size of contribution that wind farms make towards guaranteed capacity. Both studies separately came to virtually identical conclusions, that wind energy currently contributes to the secure production capacity of the system, by providing 8% of its installed capacity.
As wind power capacity rises, the lower availability of the wind farms determines the reliability of the system as a whole to an ever increasing extent. Consequently the greater reliability of traditional power stations becomes increasingly eclipsed.
As a result, the relative contribution of wind power to the guaranteed capacity of our supply system up to the year 2020 will fall continuously to around 4% (FIGURE 7).
In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional power production can be replaced by these wind farms.”
Sorry, what about the fluctuations in power consumption?
Is there any data available?
I’m very sure that they are much bigger than the 100 or 200 MW of this wind farms!
Thomas – you must do adequate research before you can be “very sure” of anything.
When fluctuations in grid power supply and demand are predictable, like breakfast and dinnertime peaks and seasonal variations, they can be managed much better than unpredictable sharp declines like those experienced in South Australia recently, or Germany at Christmas 2004.
It is the unpredictable extreme changes typical of wind power that cause the gird to crash.