Guest essay by Eric Worrall
South Australia’s green politicians recently demolished their last coal plant.
Record heat blackouts: Tens of thousands without power across South Australia and Victoria
By Gemma Bath
Lexie Jeuniewic
Nick Pearson
2:03am Jan 25, 2019Tens of thousands were last night sweltering through a blackout on one of the hottest days in history after power was cut across large areas of South Australia and Victoria.
There were 76 outages across Adelaide, affecting more than 28,000 customers during the hottest day in the city’s history.
In Victoria, about 5800 properties were without power on an “oppressive” night of hot and humid weather.
“Crews continue to work through the night – we understand it’s uncomfortable being without power in the heat,” SA Power Networks said on Twitter.
“If your power goes off, turn off all appliances and leave a single switch in the ON position so you know when it’s been restored. Turn appliances on gradually when power is back.”
…
Australian Energy Market Operator CEO Audrey Zibelman said an extra 400 megawatts had been added to the grid.
“We are going forward and reactivating our reserve power (of) 400MW of additional energy.”
“The system is being utilised to its maximum – what we need everyone to do is just be aware of that and over this peak period make sure that you are not wasting energy.”
…
Not much more to say really. Thanks to the renewable supply duck neck (power only arrives when it isn’t needed), even during optimum weather, renewable electricity is useless for supplying households during heatwaves.
You can have reliable electricity or you can have renewable electricity but you can’t have both.
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Here’s a look at the Hornsdale Power Reserve’s contribution on 24t/25th
http://nemlog.com.au/nem/unit/HPRG1:HPRL1/20190124/20190125
It ran out of puff before the crisis was over, although clearly it made money out of the failure of the wind farms to meet demand.
How many times has the SA grid failed in the past three years now? My guess is five times. And now the sophists are saying it was due to coal plants failing. Sure, in the same way that shooting someone in the knee is their knee simply failing.
I’ve been assured by various Greens, that the problem is not that wind and solar aren’t producing enough power, the problem is that consumers are demanding too much power.
There is so much real scientific evidence that debunks the climate change theory so, why do people vote for politicians that have fallen for that garbage? In a democracy, the people must be to blame for being so gullible.
Gee! The Aussies demolished baseline power plants and now they don’t have enough electricity. Who woulda thunk it?
Such a high concentration of mis-informed, self serving nutters…I was wondering where you lot have been.
You really should keep off the reneweconomy site. Too many heads exploding there.
‘Tens of thousands were last night sweltering through a blackout’
But they felt GREAT! because they were sacrificing for the One World Cause. Few people will have such a great opportunity in their lives.
Some more detail at 5 minute level:
Heywood interconnector: http://nemlog.com.au/nem/ic/V-SA/20190124/20190125
Murraylink http://nemlog.com.au/nem/ic/V-S-MNSP1/20190124/20190125
Basslink: http://nemlog.com.au/nem/ic/T-V-MNSP1/20190124/20190125
Victoria-NSW http://nemlog.com.au/nem/ic/VIC1-NSW1/20190124/20190125
SA Generation: http://nemlog.com.au/nem/stns/SA1/20190124/20190125
Victoria Generation : http://nemlog.com.au/nem/stns/VIC1/20190124/20190125
You can drill down to individual power stations/windfarms and download the data for them for each state.
Batteries: http://nemlog.com.au/show/unit/20190124/20190125/?k1=nem_battery
Supply/demand/price summary
SA http://nemlog.com.au/nem/region/sa1/20190124/20190125/
Victoria http://nemlog.com.au/nem/region/vic1/20190124/20190125/
Have fun!
If you want a source of reliable electricity:
Big spinning machines
be it coal, natural gas, or water
a steam turbine , ctg or hydro
nothing beats it for reliability and quality
36 years in the business
Its not clear from this article if the outages are caused by a lack of supply (I doubt it) or thermal impacts on the actual delivery system. Typically when you have a supply constraint, the utility can roll the black outs. And these appear to be very small numbers or customers out, relative to the usual weather related events.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a renewable or bust advocate. But lets represent what the problem really is. Most of the wires and substations would be thermally overloaded at extreme temperatures and demands. That has nothing to do with supply – except that if you had distributed generating resources, you might solve some of the bottleneck.
Does anyone know if this really is a supply constraint? And if they are mitigating it with rolling black outs (a la California in 2001)
Since they had to curtail industrial load to meet demand, there was a supply shortage.
Since hot weather, combined with high loads, overloaded the sub-transmission and distribution systems, they were inadequately designed and/or maintained.
We are witnessing the phenomenon of unintended consequences – and it will bring about salubrious ones. The realization by energy consumers that they will not be able to depend on electricity grids in the future will (at least it should) spark the development of efficient home or small system devises that are reliable. They might be green and “sustainable” – whatever that means – but they will eventually render grids and mega-generators obsolete. This is the future, efficient on-site electricity generation systems can and will be provided by the marketplace as soon as governments allow it or push people to take matters into their own hands.
Technological and human development depends on many individual failures along the way. Governmental enforced individual conformity and pre-selection of technological “winners” ensures we will all be losers. This is one of the reasons that socialistic systems always fail.
I, too, want a magic wand.
There are quite a few reasons why economies of scale win out over individual provision in terms of overall efficiency when it comes to electricity. If small were beautiful, we wouldn’t be seeing ever bigger wind turbines for example.
“You can have reliable electricity or you can have renewable electricity but you can’t have both.”
You certainly can’t have “renewable” electricity if you don’t have reliable electricity to power the economic enterprises who pay the taxes with which governments pay for financial subsidies. Fantasies may be ephemeral but fantasies are neither low cost nor are they renewable except in the imaginations of the dreamers.
Aren’t Tesla’s batteries ready to save the day? I just realized that there is no mention of that expensive battery pack saving the day for Australians.
I linked to what the battery did here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/25/green-electricity-grid-collapses-during-aussie-heatwave/#comment-2605071
It produced 30MW for about 3 hours, and died. It was then forced to do some recharging while prices were still very expensive in order to meet contractual commitments it had made to stabilise part of the grid.
So, 30 MW for 3 hours = 90 MWh. What was the levelized costs per KWh? You know, the present worth costs of government grants, finance payments, land, construction, transmission interconnection, wheeling payments, operation, maintenance, charging, re-charging, degradation of usable capacity, end-of-life replacement, decommissioning, etc.
Please note that activists, rent-seekers and politicians never tell you that stuff.
What seems to be the problem? Surely all the Right People in Australia have all the power they want. Only those stupid Deplorables have to do without. And who cares about them, anyway? Surely not Their Betters.
What is worse is that this didn’t even happen during a proper Heat Wave.
The break down of daily temperatures in Adelaide are basically this: Normal Summer, Normal Summer, Normal Summer, Stinking Hot, Cold, Cold, Sunday.
Yes Thursday was Stinking Hot, but it was a dry heat and to be perfectly honest, not that bad. Sure I would not want to run around in it, but being outside was quite nice and actually better than being inside our office where, due to the air con struggling, it was starting to get quite humid.
(also driving home was fun while trying to steer without physically touching the steering wheel after again failing to get a parking spot with afternoon shade, but that is any summer day)
Come Friday however the temps had dropped. It struggled to reach 26C which for this time of the year is about 3C below average and Saturday was pretty much the same.
So I honestly reject the media claims that this was a Heat Wave. It was one stinking hot day. One. We had one day at the ends of the bell curve and the system partly failed and after this ONE day we get the leader of the Greens telling us we need to use less electricity and we have only ourselves to blame.
Not good.
Spot on Craig. That was my experience in SA as well
Funny that, when there wasn’t a storm blowing down the cables. However South Australians can take comfort from the fact that the power would have gone off 4 minutes earlier were it not for their excellent Tesla storage batteries. It really proves that once renewables go much over 20% the problems start. South Australia is at 28% and the problems are severe and relentless.
There is no such thing as “renewable” energy. Stop lying, call them what they are: UNRELIABLES.
Cheap, plentiful, and reliable; only true evil tries to change even one of those things. Attacking more than one at once, well…
So why you ask do the voters in both South Australia and Victoria vote for politicians who are all for Green things like windmills and solar panels. Because the politicians run their own poll and they say that is what the public wants.
So why is that. Well on can blame both the education system which is dominated by Green thinking teacher s, but a lot of the blame is the Media. The Greens very cleverly changed from Global Warming which did not work, to Climate Change. Now we all know that the climate always changes, and the Media know that scary stories sell papers.an d TV advertising time.
So everything is change, a flood in Queensland when its time for our “Big Wet”, the Asian monsoon. Now this happens every year but it comes after a long dry spell.
So the media picks up the usual pictures of parched soil, and cattle in distress. Then comes the rain. Wonderfull now we can show floods, and yes lots of dramamatic footage.
Simply put we are loosing the War. Dr. Gobbles was quite right, “Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”.
Sadly we will have to wait until the power fails, and enough industry, what is still here in Australia is sent overseas to countries which do not believe in fairy tales.
MJE
Stup9dity annpys me. In partivu;ar today when its co;or is green. The Aussies tpdemolish their nlast vpal-fired plant and ABD SUDDENLY DISCOVER THEY DO NOT LIKE WHAT THEY GOT. (oR ALTERNATELY, THEY FEEL LIKE MARTTYRS IN A GOOD CAUSE.) fgEMBRER THE eIROPEAN mIDDLE aDE WHEN BEING A MARTYR MEANT BEING BURNT AS A WITCH? tHE GREEBIES DOISASSEMBLING OUR CUVILIZATIONARE AS FAR FROM SAVING OUR CIVILIZATION AS THOSE WITCH-HUNTERSDID WERE FRPM REALITY. tHEY CARE NO MORE FOR VICTIMS OF POWEROUTAGES than the witch hunterrs did when they dragged their victims to yhe burbibg grounds.
I thought that S.A’s renewables were almost 50 %.
Going on the other States, except Green Victoria, it seems that 5 % renewables is about as high as it should go. The Grid can cope with that without a massive “Back Up of Fossell fuel generaters.
There are now massive diesel generators in SA is a indication that the previous Labour Govt. which installed them, realised that they ha gone to far in appeasing the Greens. Its ironical as Diesal is the ditirest way to generate electricity if one is worried about CO2.
m je
Ironic? You’d think with a summer election in the offing and The watermelon Labor Gummint announcing they were installing 9 diesel gennys at a cool $10 mill each capable of consuming 80,000 litres of diesel an hour it would have been game set and match for the unreliables drongos. But no they got away with it with the unicorn Tesla Big Battery and Elon playing to the gallery.
As it transpired we had a cool election summer anyway so they were only fired up for the first time now but the usual suspects are naturally pointing the finger at coal and for them the diesel gennys simply don’t exist. They play the three monkeys like that whilst coal power stations exist but they’re Hell bent on blowing them all up as they wear out with no reinvestment in them. You’d expect the closure of Liddell will disrobe them all but it must happen sooner or later.
Another day, another alarmist article at the SMH.
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/terrifying-scientists-dig-deep-for-missing-piece-of-climate-puzzle-20190125-p50tjs.html
We’re all aborigines now, mate!
The Manager of the CSIRO informed his staff that as he understood things, in regard to Climate Science, it was all “Settled Science”
Thus he decided to re-employ climate scientists in other studies, but there were so many that he Sacked the rest.
Big scream from the Greenies and Minister Greg Hunt, a strong Greenie , , and instead the surplus scientists were given new climate reaserch in Tasmania, and thus the jobs in Antarctica. So much for settled science.
By the way I thought that the Russian had drilled a long way down, “Vostok project. So why are we paying this lot to do more drilling ?
MJE
Unfortunately, the stupidity of these people who are closing coal fired power stations across the developed world will only be brought home to them when a severe and extended cold spell leads to extended power cuts and to the deaths of large numbers of people from hypothermia. That’s when the chickens will come home to roost and those responsible for their deaths made to answer for it. They are all too thick to realise how close we are to that probability at the present time and that they, and they only, are the cause of such a potential tragedy.
It is folly to assume, given the depth and breadth (and cost) of studies made by government, that any patently predictable result of a government action or program is not intentional and expected. Were blackouts when power was most essential not expected? I would be curious as to how many MPs, how many government officeholders do not have auxiliary generators (inefficiently generating the dreaded greenhouse gasses) at their homes? Given their “Green!” administrative philosophy and their ability to afford them, they’d be fools not to be so prepared. I observe many of the most blatant AGW activists each produce as much atmospheric carbon as a small village – like with private jets to Davos. It’s like a glutton preaching abstinence.