Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; an independent report blamed operator incompetence for allowing clouds to affect the solar energy supply.
NT sacks energy chiefs after report into Alice Springs system black
Giles Parkinson 9 December 2019
The Northern Territory Labor government has sacked the territory’s two most senior energy chiefs following a damming report from the market regulator into a “system black” event that hit the city of Alice Springs in October.
Tim Duignan, the CEO of Territory Generation, and Michael Thompson, the head of network operator and systems control company Power and Water Corporation were both sacked after the government received a report from the Utilities Commission into the outage, which affected 12,000 customers for between 30 minutes and 10 hours.
…
It seems clear that this is not a problem about technology – despite some trying to sheet the blame on the amount of rooftop solar in the local grid and the impact of passing clouds – but of corporate and energy culture. And of incompetence.
An investigating report by consultants Entura – requested by the Utilities Commission – found that staff managing the system did not anticipate the approaching cloud cover, and did not know what to do when they realised what was happening and output from the Uterne solar farm and rooftop solar panels declined.
Thermal generators failed because they had not been properly maintained, and the staff had no idea how to re-start the machinery, because procedures had not been updated since the installation of a big battery. To cap things off, there was insufficient spinning reserve and the system was unstable.
…
“This whole debacle could have been avoided if the companies and the government had shown real leadership by listening to workers and acting on their concerns raised about the condition of Ron Goodin PS and the capabilities of Owen Springs to deliver reliable power to the Alice Springs community,” he ETU said in a statement.
…
Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/nt-sacks-energy-chiefs-after-report-into-alice-springs-system-black-10094/
The official report is available here.
The following is a video commentary on the story;
Even if we accept the official explanation of what went wrong, one thing is clear about our renewable future; more moving parts, more chances for some idiot to mess things up.
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Gosh, they couldn’t figure out ahead of time that clouds block the sun when they get a chance?
Are they really that clueless and stupid? Oh, wait — never mind!
Another fine example giving us all reasons to never have anything to do with solar energy fantasy land. Thanks for the warning!
Here in Aus, solar does work at the small end of the scale, domestic solar for water and has worked for many years without subsidy, so solar does have it’s place. Wide-scale, grid level solar, not so much.
I completely agree with solar hot water. That makes sense, instead of generating electricity with solar PV cells to run an electric hot water tank. About 10 times as inefficient and a 1000 times as expensive as passive solar. Maybe more. I have seen a lot of solar water heaters around the world, from old water tanks/barrels mounted on roofs, to the latest high tech, high efficiency vacuum solar hot water tube collectors in Costa Rica resorts.
Some real poor friends of mine on a S. Pacific island wanted a bit of hot water, and they had luke cool/warm running water from the municipal, so I went and bought a 100′ roll of black 5/8″ garden hose and just laid it up on the roof. Real crude, but it worked every day for about 7-8 hours to some degree or another. Sometimes scalding hot, so we put another shorter hose up to mix the cooler water with the hot water hose with a couple of adjustable valves so they could have showers. Now they got it coiled up in a makeshift box with a pane of old glass over it and it works real good. Real simple and relatively cheap, at least for me just buying a garden hose. They were so happy with that and then their neighbours saw how easy it was and now more people are doing it. Some renewable things do make sense.
My neighbour did that and hooked it up to her swimming pool. She could swim in that almost all year round.
Indeed, and even a basic setup like that works. I am sure you know, biggest energy users in the average home is cooking, space heating/cooling and water heating being the largest consumer.
OTOH my annual bill for water heating is around £160. For space heating, make that £1600
Salesman sold my late ex-father in law a solar panel system on the basis it would save half his heating bills. He deliberately left out ‘hot water alone’, £80 a year return on a £3500 investment.
£1600 for space heating, in the UK, where do you live? I am British living in Aus.
“Salesman sold my late ex-father in law a solar panel system on the basis it would save half his heating bills. He deliberately left out ‘hot water alone’, £80 a year return on a £3500 investment.”
Yep. Seen many stories like that, in the north of England where there isn’t much sun!
A thermal solar collector can harvest about 70% of the total energy hitting it. PV struggles to get 20%, and that’s before you accounted for losses in voltage conversion, charge/discharge losses etc. If you want heat use thermal not PV. Sadly a fair amount of grid connected PV will inevitably end up wasted generating heat.
The best thing about PV , especially in places like NT , it that it mean anyone can go off grid with a reasonable amount of on site storage and be free of these bureaucrats and incompetent parasites running the utilities.
If the grid management got their act together they should be able to supply a large amount of the peak demand for air-con with PV, without the need to massive battery storage systems. The peak production and peak demand are the same time of day.
The Alice black-out debacle was all about bad governance and ignoring known issues and commissioned studies for a decade. Also stupid target of 50% renewables in ten years, which at the end of the day is just the ground zero impact of all the CO2 hysteria which is being pushed globally. False and distorted priorities will lead to bad descisions and outcomes.
A company here in Somerset had a similar blackout when the mains electricity supply failed and no-one could remember how to start the back-up generator.
A director was sacked and from then on the generator was run up once a month.
I was recently counting thermal vs EV solar water heating and currently I’m decided for EV. Yes efficiency is 20% vs. 70%, but thermal efficiency is very low during freezing temperatures. They are practically unusable 6 months per year in my conditions. EV efficiency is increasing in lower temperatures.
Other thing is that thermal collector 1.5m2 costs around 700 Euros here. While EV collector 1.5m2 280W costs 120 Euros.
So for efficiency of EV is 3.5 times lower than thermal, but price is 5.8 times lower, that means that I will get more W per Euro with EV collectors.
Next thing is that installation is much simpler with EV, installing pipelines on roof for thermal collectors is not easy, while EV with just cable under my roofing is very simple.
Ok, you are in the EU zone? I did state Aus, bit warmer here.
Yes, I’m. Anyway I was using 6 year hand made solar collector, quite successfully. Simply few meters of pipe under glass on the roof, together with 500l boiler. I was able to spare around 50% for water heating energy.
So in your case freezing is not an issue, but other reasons to go for EV are still there.
” The peak production and peak demand are the same time of day.”
OH NO! NOT AGAIN!!!
They are NOT. This nonsense is constantly regurgigated, but completely wrong. Peak PV production is near noon, peak demand is in the late afternoon. Google “Duck Curve”.
@ur momisugly tty
“ Peak PV production is near noon,”
Only iffen you have a flat roof (to the zenith) and your solar panels are mounted flat on said roof.
Go “whole hog” and mount “sun tracker” solar panels.
In South east Queensland I installed 200 meters of 13mm black micro irrigation polly pipe from my pool across my roof, 20 years ago, & a 12V solar powered 15 PSI pump to circulate the water.
My pool is a lovely temperature in winter, & the system is run for very little time in summer. The system has required almost no maintenance.
I got by for some time using a black plastic 20litre drum left in the hot sun on the driveway, gave me more than enough hot water to mix with cold and have a decent shower etc
I think Roy Spencer, on his website, did a detailed post on his construction of a solar water-heater.
that is it in a nutshell, solar has its place, but its not going to power cities.
No, it won’t power cities, but if you add up the tens of millions of solar thermal installations around the world, it adds up to a sizeable chunk of energy being displaced. As others noted, thermal solar doesn’t work great in the short winter days up north, unless using the higher tech vacuum tubes that are real high efficiency. Of course, if there is not much solar insolation, it doesn’t matter much if it is high tech solar vacuum tubes, or solar PV electricity. There is little warmth in the winter Sun, especially if it is cloudy and foggy, and then there isn’t even 8 hours of daylight north of London or Vancouver for 2-3 months every winter anyway.
Passive solar energy also makes a lot of sense, which is just south facing windows and some heat mass storage like black tile/cement absorbing the heat. Thermal solar makes sense because it is relatively inexpensive and little maintenance for what you get in return for a long time. Especially as energy prices increase, passive and thermal solar will be a big benefit for both space and water heating. Much more cost effective than solar PV electricity, even without any subsidy. It is a sizeable market globally, and one we should we should really support and promote.
We live in this zone and do passive solar heating just with windows. Have many of them east/south facing windows. The windows are the double pane good quality ones. When it’s sunny for the few hours, like today, the sun is very low and hits the windows directly thus warming that side of the house up noticeably. We heat with wood and take advantage of this and do the ash dumping out of the stove during this time. It gets cold early afternoon as sunset is at 4:30 now.
So what happens every night?
That’s where the thermal capacity comes in.
Back in the 1970s, when Mother Earth News was published, there were all sorts of clever ways to use solar sourcing as a means of collecting heat and even powering a home ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS. Those worked. I can vouch for the benefits of solar heat in the winter, because I have a south-facing bay window that lets in lots of sunshine and solar heat in the winter, but only on sunny days. That cuts my heating bill just a tad.
Fast forward to now and we have the misunderstanding that doing it on an individual basis works but for the giant solar fields – not so much.
Solar stuff works on an individual basis, as long as you know how to use it. That’s the point to the passive solar home design: collect the solar heat and send it through the dwelling.
I have yet to see anything that says commercial solar plants are worth the time and cost and destruction of wildlife, and ditto for wind power. On an individual basis, yes. Commercial basis – N-O, NO!
Money would be better spent on good insulation in the ceilings and a polycarbonate roof, along with a house design like reverse brick veneer. Depends where you live but you could almost get away with zero heating in Adelaide (where you would need a design that shades it in winter).
Because the weather is not very cold in winter, a clear enclosure can get hot enough to have a Brit complaining of a heat wave. Spreading the heat around the house can warm it up quickly and store it overnight.
I live in a small double brick home that only has single glazing and roof insulation. I can spend most of the winter hardly turning on the heater or air-conditioning in summer. I just need to air the house during warmer days and cool nights during summer. Most of the walls are protected from the sun by trees and if I had room with a glazed wall filled with sun and insulation between the bricks, I could get away with no heating or air-conditioning at all.
Hot water is the instant gas heating type that costs very little to run.
Clearly you need a cloud spotter shortly followed by a dust spotter but here at WUWT we know when to get in on the gravy train. So my thought is we need to offer to develop some AI for them to which will do the spotting so how many millions do you think we should quote to do the work?
Why don’t we take the NZ PM’s lead and ban everything she does not like that may affect renewables?
NT, “You chose poorly.”
Then NT ages rapidly, dries up & blows away.
The people who SHOULD be fired (and perhaps investigated and jailed) are the idiots who approved destroying their old reliable electrical generating system and implementing a system based – essentially – on unicorn farts.
Those would be the politicians. The best you can hope for is to vote them out of office.
Getting rid of the top 2 folks — assuming they did know how the operation should be run — sounds a lot like how Hugo Chávez ruined the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela.
Whether or not Tim Duignan and Michael Thompson knew the business or not, I don’t know. They may have been ideological friends of someone from the political group.
Perhaps the full story will find the light, or not.
That’s exactly the problem- these over educated fools never have to answer to anyone or suffer the consequences of their idiocy. ‘Skin in the Game’ is a great book which shows this clearly- basically they have no skin in the game so there’s no reason for them to be concerned about the outcome and no chance of them being sacked for incompetence so they just carry on and more of the same happens.
The amount of sunlight controls everything, either indirectly, or in this case directly.
Why didn’t they treat it like a very early sunset? Paradigm shift time. Paradigm time shift?
Sunset comes, and everyone sleeps.
Jo Nova will need to update her talk How To Destroy A Perfectly Good Grid in Three Easy Steps.
Hopefully this will work:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYHX-Ib3Q5Q&w=560&h=315%5D
They’re going to need a bigger battery.
No doubt the cloud was sent by Exxon. 😉
No, but Exxon knew that cloud was coming and they did nothing to stop it or at least warn authorities!
But seriously, the whole text reads as some dystopian report from communist country.
All this responsibilities, planning, carrying, failing, blaming and so on. I’m having a deja vu all over again.
What is missing is inventing shooting the collaborators.
You say the battery failed?
Not so much failed. When the generators tripped out, the battery was unable to supply the full load demand so it too tripped out.
I clearly remember the northeast blackout of 2003. I also remember the Walkerton water tragedy. How about the wildfire crap storm caused by the government of California and PG&E. And then there’s Chernobyl.
All the above can be blamed, one way or another, on operator error. Deeper than that, we have safety culture that suffers when management tries to save a few bucks by skimping in the wrong places.
A couple of people got sacked in Alice Springs. I would also look for blame higher in the food chain.
“following a damming report from the market regulator”
It’s obviously easy to hit the wrong key. Unless it was meant as a pun.
Damn grammar National Socialists.
Damming report just in, still no dam.
“A couple of people got sacked in Alice Springs. “
No. The corporation CEOs in Darwin were sacked.
Natural Selection?
Children won’t know what clouds are or electricity or something.
And … No moving parts and Nature/Weather WILL screw you up also
Yeahbut….
I mean, a cloud. Who could have expected a cloud? They were never modelled in the climate models, so they don’t exist, Shirley?
And last time I watched Neighbours, the sky was solid blue all the time. Shirley, they don’t get clouds here in Oz?
Perhaps Australia will wake up to the fact that the climate naturally changes and solar cells and windmills are not a viable alternative to fossil fuel fired generating plants. With modern power plants emissions are very close to zero for any pollutants and 99+% of the exhaust is water vapor and carbon dioxide.
Yes, especially all the brand new super critical plants China has been building, while the so-called developed countries do a death spiral investing precious resources on subsidy mining tech. The green nazis don’t care about the real efficiencies, just the political climate.
Australia wake up? Yeah nah!
They’ve been stumbling from bad to worse, and from worse to silly, and from silly to ridiculous.
No sign of common sense yet.
It is ridiculous to believe that climate can change. Only climate change deniers do that.
PS: Hey IPCC, how much did I make? Where is my money?
Sounds like it could have been worse, but not by much. I bet that both of the two who were fired were receiving very nice paychecks prior to all of this. All money wasted over the years.
the temps would be in the high 30s to close to 40 or so as well, so a LOT of very peeved consumers,
I guess pine gaps got its own power supply somehow…of course.
Idiot Leftists everywhere think that electricity simply comes from a wall socket… until it doesn’t anymore.
Then they ask “why?” and point a finger looking to blame someone else.
As my Grandmother used to say, “When you have one finger pointed out, 3 fingers are pointed back.”
Libtards need to understand that when their controlling schemes fail and they start their finger wagging blame-game.
Everything is free, clear, and everyone is oh so green, but rarely green. Energy when the wind blows out of range, when the sun shines below threshold, and, of course, the blight factor of Green.
Backups often fail unless properly maintained and tested.
seen that a few times over the years:
1. diesel generator at a telephone exchange , power outage and “CLICK” no start due to no maintenance on starter battery.
2. customer dutifully takes back ups for years , has issue and has to resort to back ups. Calls us in when it doesnt work. Turns out they had no viable back ups despite everything reporting OK. They never thought to ever test recovery of data.
3. company outsources email and assumes (but never specifies or contracts) level of required backups and history to be retained. Gets ugly very quickly when emails are required as part of a legal case.
And maintaining requires money which believe it or not affects the economic viability.
Yes. About 10 years ago Atlanta was expecting a major winter storm. So they pre-positioned snow ploughs equipped with brine solution, put crews on alert and thought they were prepared. Then the power went out impacting several of the Department of Transportation sites where the trucks were waiting. Turns out, the trucks hadn’t been fueled and with the power out the fuel pumps didn’t work.
I wish I could remember where this happened, but there was an incident where emergency vehicles couldn’t respond because the garage doors were electrically powered and there was no back-up power for the garage.
What do they do at night?
After the battery goes dead in 27 minutes, it is lights out and bed time. At least darkness is predictable for these geniuses.
I know you’re kidding about the bed time, but are you also kidding about the 27 minutes? That would be an enormous battery.
It’s my understanding that the world’s biggest battery is a Tesla Powerpack in in Hornsdale, South Australia (cost A$66,000,000). But it’s NOT for significant energy storage. It’s for “frequency regulation” (FCAS) and minute-by-minute electricity arbitrage, not to cover solar/wind output lapses, because its 129 MWh capacity = just 4 minutes of power usage at South Australia’s average usage rate (much less during peaks), and the battery can’t discharge that fast anyhow.
From the report:
“It seems clear that this is not a problem about technology – despite some trying to sheet the blame on the amount of rooftop solar in the local grid and the impact of passing clouds – but of corporate and energy culture. And of incompetence.”
Juggling power sources is a basic task of grid management, whatever kind of power sources you have. Company management failed and was held responsible.
“more moving parts, more chances for some idiot to mess things up”
In fact, solar has few moving parts. On the other hand, from the report:
“Thermal generators failed because they had not been properly maintained…”
“More moving parts” was in reference to the system. It meant more components, especially unreliable ones.
Yep.
Thanks Scissor; that was really hard to figure out. Oh wait, no it wasn’t.
Scissor, it was just Mr Stokes being deliberately obtuse again when attempting to defend the indefensible
Mr Stokes being deliberately obtuse again when attempting to defend the indefensible
Reminds of the old adage — A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
““Thermal generators failed because they had not been properly maintained…”
Why would that be? Maybe they were “encouraged”, through Govn’t policy, to not waste money on traditional thermal generators because “renewables” are the future given we are all told “renewables”, which is better and cheaper with battery backup, than thermal generators?
She’ll be right mate!
“Why would that be?”
Somebody wasn’t doing it properly. That can happen, without the help of climate activists. Even in the NT. The management of the corporation which was supposed to do the job have been fired.
Is that your pathetic excuse? So now “someone” wasn’t doing it “properly”? Well, someone WAS doing it properly before renewables, there is ample evidence of that.
“So now “someone” wasn’t doing it “properly”?”
Now??? It is the conclusion of the report. Eric even highlighted it
“staff managing the system did not anticipate the approaching cloud cover, and did not know what to do “
and
“Thermal generators failed because they had not been properly maintained, and the staff had no idea how to re-start the machinery”
and so
“The Northern Territory Labor government has sacked the territory’s two most senior energy chiefs”
“Nick Stokes December 11, 2019 at 1:15 am”
That is a thermal generating problem?
Stokes –>
1) “Thermal generators failed because they had not been properly maintained,”
2) “staff had no idea how to re-start the machinery”
Which is it? Did they fail, or people didn’t know how to restart them?
Sounds like a cluster- “you-know-what” all the way around. Sounds very much like the attitude that says “how can we say renewables will work if we always keep enough fossil fuel systems on line to back them up”.
Jim,
Some of the failures sounded a lot like why it took 7 days to turn the power back on after a PSPS in CA.
https://qz.com/work/1225213/the-difference-between-a-snafu-a-shitshow-and-a-clusterfuck/
Solar doesn’t need Moving Parts to fail, Just Clouds (weather) and Night Time (more than 1/2 the 24 hour period)
And, in the case of Rooftop Installations a failure to self cool
I recall back in the UK hospital emergency generators failing because they weren’t allowed to be run when not needed! Rules were later changed to allow them to be run on a routine basis to ensure that they work well.
The NT government have actually learned from their mistake and now require any new renewable energy project guarantee a certain amount of power in 30 minute increments (?) when required .
Subsidy farmers are not happy because it requires them to have a certain percentage of power available at all times and the only way they can do that is with expensive generators .
On the other hand this should be the yard stick for all solar or wind projects and that’s a guarantee of supply .
I wander what would happen if a cloud rolled over a coal/gas/nuclear powered plant? BTW, this is a rhetorical question.
A cloud of… what? (Besides retorical questions)
Same as the ones in the article that crippled the grid.
Be careful what you wonder.
I was thinking more tsunami than cloud when I read your post.
Only in Japan’s corrupt politico/industrial complex are such risks ignored.
In your world, tsunamis have the same frequency as clouds?
You nail it there Dean.
‘Climate’ science is a branch of Political Science NOT the physical sciences and in turn is part of the broad spectrum of ‘intellectual’ study known as The Arts. It is a spin off from theatre and talking in tongues.
At least in California when the solar eclipse happened a few years back, the solar engineers were intelligent enough to realize that there was going to be a black out that morning for at least 4 minutes and less solar insolation while the eclipse was scaling up and back down for a few hours. That had a significant impact on the grid for that time frame, at least planning for the solar electricity deficit that would naturally occur. Of course, that was predictable for years in advance, so there would be no excuse for messing up that one. There must be something in the water in OZ for these fruit loops not to be able to plan for some cloudy weather and what to do if their power drops off due to some clouds. So much for the utility battery back-up nonsense. Must be embarrassing to admit to putting up with that level of ignorance.
Nah, just sheer laziness.
NT not equal OZ, or indicative of much of anything in OZ.
Should be noted however though that this is were the Singapore Solar extension cord project dreams of being hosted.
I wonder when the eco-nazis will realize that the only proper way to do solar is way above the clouds, with solar power satellites. Of course, it involves putting up with a continuously running maser rivalling the Death Star’s cannon, but that’s a small detail compared with saving the Fatherland, um, I mean the environment, of course.
I used to think so, I mean a few Orion nuclear launches and maybe you have a space based solar power system.
But space is a surprisingly hostile environment in some ways, so likely a lot of improvements would be required to make the system durable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosion_in_space
Good link, I’ll add the information contained therein to my quiver of scepticism regarding satellites used in the collection of planetary temperatures. 🙂
Don’t forget about getting rid of heat in space. You read about the broiling heat on the sun-side and freezing on the shaded side of an object in space, but in reality the only way the object can shed heat is by radiating it out. Vacuum is quite a good insulator.
If you look at pictures of the ISS you can see a large number of the radiators. Without them it wouldn’t take long for the inhabitants to cook inside. The engineering around heat transfer in satellite design is pretty complex.
A couple of mega watts spread over a couple of square miles works out to a power density that is barely measurable.
As a point of interest, the wind-power-facilities along the Oregon/Washington (Columbia River) border have produced almost no electricity in the past week.
See the green line here:
https://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx
This should change about Noon on Wednesday, but by Thursday evening it will go away again. The 36 hours will also be wet.
Hydro does the heavy lifting in the region while thermal and nuclear are smaller but steady.
So the cloud got off Scot-free and wasn’t sacked? It’s not what you know but who you know nowadays.