Tim Dornin, Australian Associated Press
August 7, 2019 2:27am
The Australian Energy Regular will take four South Australian wind farm operators to court accusing them of failing to perform properly during SA’s statewide blackout in 2016.
The action in the Federal Court will allege AGL Energy Ltd, Neoen SA, Pacific Hydro Ltd and Tilt Renewables all breached the National Electricity Rules.
“The AER has brought these proceedings to send a strong signal to all energy businesses about the importance of compliance with performance standards to promote system security and reliability” chair Paula Conboy said.
“These alleged failures contributed to the black system event, and meant that Australian Energy Market Operator was not fully informed when responding to system-wide failure.”
The allegations relate to the performance of wind farms during the severe weather event that swept across SA in September 2016 and which ultimately triggered the statewide power outage.
The storms damaged more than 20 towers in the state’s mid-north, bringing down major transmission lines and causing a knock-on effect across the state’s energy grid.
About 850,000 customers lost power, with some in the state’s north and on the Eyre Peninsula left without electricity for several days.
A report from AEMO released about a month later found nine of 13 wind farms online at the time of the blackout switched off when the transmission lines came down.
It found the inability of the wind farms to ride through those disturbances was the result of safety settings that forced them to disconnect or reduce output.
The blackout also sparked a war of words between supporters of renewable power and those who blamed SA’s high reliance on wind and solar generation as a contributing factor.
That included an infamous confrontation between former Premier Jay Weatherill and then Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg at a media conference in Adelaide, with Mr Weatherill lashing the coalition’s “anti-South Australian stance” as a disgrace.
Current Energy Minister Angus Taylor said it was important for the regulator to enforce market rules.
“We need to have reliable power in this country … and that means all generators need to perform,” he said.
In its action, the AER alleges each of the wind farm operators failed to ensure that their plant and associated facilities complied with their generator performance standard requirement to ride-through certain disturbances.
It also alleges that the wind farm operators failed to provide automatic protection systems to enable them to ride-through voltage disturbances to ensure continuity of supply, in contravention of the National Electricity Rules.
The AER is seeking declarations, penalties, compliance program orders and costs.
The blackout also sparked a war of words between supporters of renewable power and those who blamed SA’s high reliance on wind and solar generation as a contributing factor.
That included an infamous confrontation between former Premier Jay Weatherill and then Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg at a media conference in Adelaide, with Mr Weatherill lashing the coalition’s “anti-South Australian stance” as a disgrace.
Current Energy Minister Angus Taylor said it was important for the regulator to enforce market rules.
“We need to have reliable power in this country … and that means all generators need to perform,” he said.
In its action, the AER alleges each of the wind farm operators failed to ensure that their plant and associated facilities complied with their generator performance standard requirement to ride-through certain disturbances.
It also alleges that the wind farm operators failed to provide automatic protection systems to enable them to ride-through voltage disturbances to ensure continuity of supply, in contravention of the National Electricity Rules.
The AER is seeking declarations, penalties, compliance program orders and costs.
HT/ozspeaksup
Chris Kenny on the silence of the lambs in Oz with their looming problem-
https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6071783068001
After Chris Uhlmann at Aunty (ABC) told it like it was with the SA blackout you knew he couldn’t last with the climate changers and true believers in unreliables. All we got from Aunty was an appalling anecdotal puff piece of dooming weather events on Sunday night euphemistically called Climate Change: The Facts. If I mentioned it contained Attenborough, Mann, Oreskes, Hansen and more you would get the picture along with the promo-
“Using dramatic user-generated content and emotional first-hand accounts, this documentary delivers testimonies to global warming simply and strikingly. Intimate stories get inside the lives of the people affected by changing climates, and those fighting it.”
“This is the story of a human race approaching environmental catastrophe. And how we can prevent it.”
http://about.abc.net.au/media-room/abc-to-air-climate-change-the-facts-presented-by-sir-david-attenborough/
Goebbels would approve.
This story beautifully illustrates the problem with arguing about CAGW and renewables.
The blackout was due to technical and operational weaknesses in wind power, some of them inherent, some of them due to greed and incompetence by the operators, both of the wind farms and the grid.
What actually happened has been thoroughly analyzed and published:
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market_Notices_and_Events/Power_System_Incident_Reports/2017/Integrated-Final-Report-SA-Black-System-28-September-2016.pdf
There is some waffle there, to try and paper over the inavoidable weaknesses of wind power, but otherwise it is a thorough and technically competent report.
And virtually nobody here or anywhere else seems to have read and understood it (Jo Nova excepted, as usual).
If you have the basis for this lawsuit is crystal clear, a number of wind farm operators (not all!) have, through extreme incompetence/negligence, failed to configure their wind turbines in accordance with their contractual obligations and thereby caused the state-wide blackout.
Unfortunately to understand what happened and why requires a modicum of technical knowledge and understanding, which the judges and lawyers almost certainly lack.
There’s nowhere for any of them to hide with the internet nowadays and obviously the UK event is of interest to those following closely Oz grid combobulations- http://www.wattclarity.com.au/
By the way those “customers … in the state’s north and on the Eyre Peninsula left without electricity for several days” would not have been any better off if the wind farms had been correctly set. They were the ones directly affected by the blown-down transmission lines.
But there would not have been any blackout in the rest of SA with correctly set wind turbines.
Wind power from the hills near Adelaide, where most of the SA wind power is located, was all over the place during that storm. The technical report on the blackout causes is like blaming the match for a fire in a pile of wood:
I disagree. While the individual windfarms were fluctuating wildly, their individual output was not significant enough to cause the disturbances that led to their eventual tripping which then resulted in the generation shortfall which then overloaded the Heywood interconnector which THEN caused the thermal generators to finally trip and blackout South Australia.
It is all beautifully laid out in the AEMO report that tty has linked.
On the other hand, the partial blackouts in Victoria last January and in the UK last Friday WERE caused by the intermittent output as they produced large generation shortfalls that require large scale load shedding. Demand management with large percentage of intermittent generation MUST involve urban blackouts as there are insufficient industrial and other loads that can be shed and thermal generators CANNOT ramp quickly enough in these instances.
As for batteries saving the day, the greentards really need to do the math (and probably need to learn the math) to see why this is not a realistic solution.
May I offer a simple solution . For every lost day of power the politicians lose a months pay .
You know an alignment of interest .
They can weigh out whether the corporate donations and contracts to pals is worth it .