![wind-turbine[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/wind-turbine1.jpg?quality=83)
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova – Major employers are getting fed up, as South Australia, rapidly becoming the world’s renewable energy crash test dummy, has again experienced a costly unscheduled blackout.
BHP issues jobs warning after another SA blackout
South Australia’s electricity system separated from the national power grid overnight, prompting a stern warning from BHP Billiton about threats to Australian jobs and investment.
About 200,000 homes and businesses lost power for over an hour, but BHP’s Olympic Dam operations in the north of the state were interrupted for about four hours.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) confirmed today that the disconnection happened at 1.33am, due to “an issue on the Victorian transmission network, impacting the flow via the Heywood Interconnector to South Australia”.
…
BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie issued an urgent warning to policy-makers after the latest incident, which comes two months after the statewide blackout led to about two weeks of lost production at Olympic Dam.
“Olympic Dam’s latest outage shows Australia’s investability and jobs are placed in peril by the failure of policy to both reduce emissions and secure affordable, dispatchable and uninterrupted power,” he said in a statement.
“The challenge to reduce emissions and grow the economy cannot fall to renewables alone.
“This is a wake-up call ahead of the COAG meeting and power supply and security must be top of the agenda and urgently addressed.”
The incident also cut power to a Victorian smelter for about three hours.
…
Read more: http://indaily.com.au/news/local/2016/12/01/sa-disconnects-from-national-power-grid-overnight/
The South Australian government was quick to respond to BHP’s harsh criticism of their mismanagement of grid stability.
… Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said the problems were on the Victorian side of the border and “South Australia’s grid operated effectively as an island and load began to be restored within half an hour”.
He said BHP built back-up power at its mines across the world.
“Why they haven’t done so at Olympic Dam is a matter for them,” he said. …
Read more: Same link as above
See – the problems are not the fault of South Australia’s lunatic green government driving the state electricity grid to the brink of collapse. The problem is BHP made the mistake of expecting reliable electricity – they should have built redundant backup systems, like they do in corrupt idiocracies in the third world.
Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said … “BHP built back-up power at its mines across the world. Why they haven’t done so at Olympic Dam is a matter for them,”
So they are admitting that South Australia is now a third world country (where you always need power backup)?
Interconnectors look like an attractive target for terrorists.
Or ships anchoring in a storm apparently.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/11/29/winter-power-crunch-fears-uk-france-cables-severed-storm/
Yep, 4 lines down I read elsewhere.
Late to weigh in, but as a veteran of power plant operation, I can only recommend installing some robotic gas turbines equal to the potential downward variation in supply possible when wind and solar both subside to prevent Knocking your Hydro-system off-line and having to initiate a black grid startup.
No money in it from government subsidies mate. So they will prefer windmills and fcuk the public.
Renewable drivers, consumable technology, unstable energy production. The Environmentalist propaganda is a double-edged scalpel that should be administered equally.
That has to be a new low for the attitude of a grid operator. A new low in an era of new lows.
Another record. Is there nothing that CO2 can’t do.
the problem is South Australia and Victoria have Labour Gov,t and the greens have convinced the far left to close coal power stations so when no sun or wind the answer is no power simple http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-02/alcoa-curtails-production-at-portland-smelter/8085840
The Victorian Employment Minister can dribble all the platitudes he likes but as Greg Brown reports in The Australian today (Dec 2nd)-
“A major power outage at the Alcoa aluminium smelter in Victoria’s west has forced the closure of more than half of its manufacturing capacity with fears that the plant may never fully recover.
The plant in Portland, 350km southwest of Melbourne, employs about 500 people and the power outage comes as its owner is trying to negotiate a competitive power deal that will keep its doors open.
Analysts predicted that the closure of the Hazelwood power station would precipitate the closure of the Portland smelter due to higher power costs. The closure of the smelter would impact 2000 jobs, with the local council predicting Portland would lose 30 per cent of it’s population”
When SA was islanded with the interconnector shut off power prices rocketed to $14000/Mwhr so you can see where the big industry users are coming from and looking ahead to Hazelwood closure must be wondering if their investments are going to go the same way.
That makes sense but maybe not for Greens
Resourceguy:
I’m sure the Greens regard closing a smelter as a victory. That it is replaced with highly polluting marginal, energy inefficient capacity in China matters to them not a jot. Lots more CO2 emissions, and lots more PFCs.
We clearly need to dismantle our current industrial society which stupidly and wastefully requires constant and non-intermittent, polluting power and get back to the pre-industrial bliss we once had when money and the latest technology grew on trees and we all rode gentle non polluting horses and bullocks!
The climate was also cool and stable then without these traumatizing ups and downs of hundreds of a degree C and all was well with the world.
Also, think of the children!!!!!!
Currently in the UK, we are importing more electricity from the Netherlands (1% of total demand) than from wind/solar (0.8%) – http://energynumbers.info/gbgrid. This is updated every 5 mins. The weather has been pretty calm in UK for a week now. I cannot imagine any electrical storage system that would continue to supply a nation’s electricity for days on end but I can imagine the outcry if we had blackouts lasting more than a few hours across the entire country.
We always import from the Netherlands and until the recent accident we were importing the same from France (with a short spell of exporting due to the French reactor problems).
It may be as you say when you write, but earlier in the week wind power was much higher…
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
There are by the way another 7 GW of interconnectors to various countries on the planning board, including Iceland and Norway, plus as much wind power as we currently have will be delivered by 2020.
Really there is no UK winter crisis, even with a cable to France out and most of the coal power closed…why are you so keen on a crisis?
“Griff December 2, 2016 at 1:42 am
Really there is no UK winter crisis”
Talk to the people who suffer your opinion. Oh wait, they are dead already.
“…why are you so keen on a crisis?”
Dripping with irony under the circumstances Griff. We’re not the ones who see a crisis over this-
http://www.thegwpf.com/forget-paris-germany-opens-new-coal-power-plant/