by Planning Engineer (Russ Schussler)
In October of 2025, the isolated small city of Broken Hill in New South Wales, Australia with a 36 MW load (including the large nearby mines) could not be reliably served by 200 MW of wind, a 53 MW solar array, significant residential solar, and a large 50 MW battery all supplemented by diesel generators.
Many people falsely believe that wind, solar and batteries have been demonstrated to provide grid support and deliver energy independently in large real word applications. Few people realize that we are a long way away from having wind, solar and batteries support a large power system without significant amounts of conventional spinning generation (nuclear, gas, coal, hydro, geothermal) on-line to support the grid.
Broken Hill Outage – Wind, Solar and Battery Can Not Support the Grid
The recent outages occurring in Broken Hill help illustrate the inability of wind, solar and batteries to support electric grids without significant help from machines rotating in synchronism with the grid. (Note – wind power is produced by rotation but not in synchronism with the grid).
Around 20,000 people live in the Broken Hill area. Over $650 million in investment made Broken Hill home to a 200 MW wind plant, a 53 MW solar array, and a large battery that could provide 50 MW of power for 100 MWh through advanced grid forming inverters. Broken Hill is home to over 6,000 small-scale solar systems providing a per capita energy small solar production level almost twice the Australian average. The area also contains two poorly maintained diesel-powered gas turbine generators in the area, one which was off-line for maintenance.
Broken Hill became renewable energy industry’s Potemkin Village:
In 2018, Broken Hill City Council announced its goal to become Australia’s first carbon-free city by 2030. Three years ago, then mayor Darriea Turley welcomed the announcement that AGL was proceeding with plans to build a grid-scale battery, which the company claimed would be a reliable backup power source for 10,000 homes. “This is a great opportunity for Broken Hill and renewable energies,” Turley told the ABC. “What they will see is when there is an outage, the battery would click into operation.”
In October of 2024 this area was separated from the larger grid when the interconnecting transmission towers went down in a bad storm. Loads in Broken Hill are limited to about 20 MW of mining load and 17 MW that serve the local town for a combined load of 36 MW. The over 300 MWs of renewable energy from wind, solar and battery storage, along with a diesel generator were not able to provide reliable power to support the town alone.
A 25 MW gas plant or a 25 MW hydro plant would have done a much better job than the combined efforts of 200 MW of wind, 53 MW of solar, the 34 MW of distributed solar and 50 MW battery. The consequences for Broken Hill were serious. The Australian ran an article entitled: Broken Hill: Powerless and left to live like mushrooms where it described the situation:
The power comes on from time to time, but goes out just as quickly. It gives us just enough time to power our phones and read emails from energy providers sent the day before, alerting us to the fact the power was about to go out. They also warn we don’t have much time, and to avoid using unnecessary electrical devices – air conditioners, fridges or fans that need a power point.
In theory the area could be served, but in reality as noted by Jo Nova , “The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally “
Haven’t I Seen Many Reports Where Large Systems Ran Just on Wind and Solar?
It is common to see articles describing how wind and solar served all or nearly all of areas load during some time period. These descriptions are all misleading. They may accurately describe how many kWhs of energy wind and solar produce as well as how many kWhs of load were served, but they do not provide information on all the conventional rotating machinery that was also deployed to support the grid with needed essential reliability services. They imply (or sometimes falsely state) that just “renewables” served the load, but in fact benefits from conventional rotating machinery connected on-line where needed in order to support the grid and maintain stability. Broken Hill produced much more “renewable” energy then it used and exported large amounts. But despite the huge green resources, Broken Hill has remained dependent on the interconnected grid to support its own small load.
It means nothing to talk about how much wind and solar has contributed if you don’t also share how much rotating machinery was also interconnected on-line. So, the question remains, “has anyone demonstrated that wind, solar and batteries alone can effectively supply reliable service to a general load of any significance?” I’ve never come across anything like that, perhaps because what’s been done so far is nothing to brag about. Partial and misleading information makes for better press.
Advocates and Academics Tend to Ignore the Real Problem
As described here, academics and advocates don’t usually get around to the crucial question as to whether the grid can survive without rotating machines. The first question Academics address is “can wind and solar provide the needed kWh?” If their studies suggest this is nominally possible, they jump to the conclusion that such resources can replace conventional generation. Clearly in Broken Hill, the resources there were sufficiently large to provide energy/kWhs far in excess of the demand. But having enough kWhs is not enough to reliably serve loads.
Academics sometimes go a little deeper sometimes and address a second question which is the intermittency of energy production associated with wind and solar. Looking at when energy is needed and when it is produced, the claim is that batteries paired with these resources can support the grid by providing energy when it was needed. In Broken Hill, the problem does not seem to be intermittency. Wind and solar energy were available in abundance during the blackouts. The energy just could not be reliably integrated with the grid. Having enough kWhs at the right time and place is not enough to reliably serve loads.
The real problem is that wind, solar and batteries do not readily provide essential reliability services. Wind, solar and batteries provide energy through an electronic inverter. In practice, they lean on and are supported by conventional rotating machines. Essential Reliability Services include the ability to ramp up and down, frequency support, inertia and voltage support.
The question of essential reliability services is the sticking point for integrating large amounts of wind, solar and batteries. It is common to see cost comparisons between “renewables” and conventional generation, invariably suggesting that wind and solar may be cheaper. But when you add in the large overbuild needed to deal with intermittency, add in the costs of batteries to deal with intermittency and also the significant amounts of rotating generation needed for grid reliably, the costs of “inverter based renewable” generation greatly exceed the competition.
The Bigger Picture
Last year Chris Morris and I looked at “world leading” efforts in Australia to transition towards greater levels of wind and solar. We observed:
“Many are looking towards Australia and seeing bold, innovative steps to increase the penetration levels of wind and solar resources. A grid revolution around the corner? Or just the madness of crowds?”
Australia has spent large sums of money to make solar and wind work better with the grid and improve reliability. Recent outages and grid performance in Australia indicate that many great challenges are still ahead before a grid powered primarily by wind, solar and batteries can provide reliable power. The physics of the grid require more than the kWh’s of energy from wind, solar and batteries, even with state of the art inverter technology.
For over a decade now, I have explained many of the problems encountered in attempting to add increasing levels of generation from wind and solar resources. I will briefly highlight some of the problems with links that can be followed for more detailed descriptions and further links and even greater detail. Unlike conventional rotating generation, wind and solar do not readily supply inertia and other essential reliability services. As penetration of wind and solar resources increase, grid reliability decreases. The challenges of increasing wind and solar increase exponentially as you increase their share of generation. Policy makers, academics and others seeking to increase wind and solar are focusing on the wrong problems and failing to study the real operational problems inherent in inverter based generation from wind and solar.
Proponents of increasing wind and solar seek to counter such concerns by noting that with technical advances wind, solar and batteries can be made to perform “similarly” to conventional rotating generation resources and provide pseudo inertia and some degree of reliability services. Using the term “similarly” rather loosely, looking far ahead to the future and ignoring the great cost of such efforts, it is true that wind and solar will be able at some time to perform similarly to conventional generators. But similar is not good enough and that time is not now or in the near term.
Most academics and policy makers focus exclusively on the issue of intermittency, which can be solved usually at very high costs. Those who venture beyond to the real challenges undertaken by a smaller community of “experts” are often misled not distinguishing between what is “possible” and what is “probable”, as I described here:
(E)ngineers, academics and scientists jointly grapple with the critical such as providing synthetic or virtual inertia through inverter technology to aid the Texas grid. There is some hope that advanced computer controls can be developed so that asynchronous resources perform similarly enough to maintain the grid at higher penetration levels. It should be recognized that the talk is of possibilities not probabilities. Here the National Renewable Energy Laboratory concludes “Ongoing research points to the possibility of maintaining grid frequency even in systems with very low or no inertia”. The unsaid part of that statement is that it may not even be possible to maintain grid frequencies with low inertia. It’s also certainly in the mix at this point, based on the statement from National Renewable Laboratory, that in the next 20 years the best we may be able to do at higher penetration levels of asynchronous renewables is maintain frequency in a highly inferior manner with a boatload of reliability problems, with increasing blackouts at untenably high prices.
Grid supporting inverters and the capabilities of emulation today are far from what is needed. Hopes for the future may be admirable, but here is a huge gap between what might one day be, and what is practical and proven to be workable today
There is Often a Big Difference Between Theory and Practice
In theory the battery should have worked at Broken Hill. It was reported:
There has been confusion, in particular, about the Broken Hill battery, which owner AGL says on its website is capable of establishing a micro-grid in such circumstances, and could – at least in theory – have kept the lights on with the help of the huge 200 MW Silverton wind farm about 10 kms away and the 53 MW Broken Hill solar farm just across the road.
Many have touted that micro grids will make it easier to utilize wind and solar. Such is not the case, wind and solar work best connected and leaning on a large grid. See this posting to better understand Microgrids and the fuzzy thinking surrounding them. In any case, microgrids are not a way to skip past the challenges and basic needs of all grid, as the problems are based in physics and that remain unchanged. Coordinating a microgrid is extremely challenging as can be seen in how the plentiful rooftop solar worked against the overall reliability of the system and required curtailment.
The Australian called the blackout a “green power warning”. Mayor Tom Kennedy cautioned that policy makers, should learn from this experience how useful those resources are “almost useless” without baseload power. Solar panels were not only useless, but actually hindered efforts to establish reliability such that customers were urged to turn them off. “(Wind and solar) are worse than useless (in a crisis like this), because it’s detrimental to having a consistent power supply”.
Nick Cater wrote in the Australian:
Some $650m worth of renewable energy investment within a 25km radius of Broken Hill has proved to be dysfunctional. The technical challenges of operating a grid on renewable energy alone appear insurmountable using the current technology.
Conclusion
Australia has been much hyped recently as a pioneer in renewables, but the cracks are showing. There are many other stories of emerging problems that could be shared. Germany was the leader before. All that hype has crumbled, showing the Energiewende as a pipe dream with a poison pill. There is a simple point that is being widely ignored: wind, solar and batteries do not support the grid much. There are many tricks employed to help proponents and policy makers overlook this simple fact but eventually reality will hammer the point home.
Many excuses for this outage will likely emerge. I’ve heard that changing the battery setting made it more effective than it was initially. Undoubtedly inverter-based technology will continue to improve and wind and solar with the proper settings and equipment will be able to better contribute. While inverter-based generation with computer control may one day provide a lot of options, such technology will also provide tremendous complexity and challenges as well. Who will know how to make so many elements with unlimited potential operating characteristics behave well together across a multitude of potential unknown and unpredictable situations? Experience with the grid has come from many decades of study and practice. As the penetration of inverter-based resources increases I suspect every outage study after the fact will continue to find that the inverter setting could have been better.
Many can argue that the grid at Broken Hill could or should have worked better (although the failure was likely beyond their worst fears). That’s typically true for any grid during any outage. To quote Nick Cater again., “If wind, solar and storage can’t keep the beer cold in a small city like Broken Hill, how will it perform when called upon to power the rest of the country?” Policy makers pushing for standalone power systems built primarily on wind, solar and batteries are lurching towards disaster and will only avoid calamity to the extent that they are unsuccessful in their goals of removing conventional rotating machinery or are able to lean on the despised conventional technology of their interconnected neighbors.
Thanks to Chris Morris for his help and assistance with this piece
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Unless you scale it up. In which case it will.
Yup. All you need when renewables fail dismally to support much less capacity than they are rated for, is much more renewables!
I mean, only $650m for 20,000 people so far. That’s a mere $32,500 per person. An absolute pittance! Let’s throw some more taxpayer money at it!
I’m honestly not sure if you’re for real, or a parody account to discredit the renewable industry and Climate Scientology in general. It’s a toss-up.
He has net zero idea what the hell he is.
Paul Krugman, is that you trying to apply your failed socialist economic theory (if government spending doesn’t work it’s only because the government didn’t spend enough) to renewable energy?
WRONG. as always.
The more you upscale the more it DESTROYS the grid’s stability !
Try improving your reading comprehension, the key point Russ was trying to make is that stability requires the inertia provide by rotating synchronous machines connected to the grid. Upscaling wind and solar DOES NOTHING to provide the necessary grid inertia.
One thing Russ left out is that synchronous machines also provide VAR (reactive power) support in a way that enhances voltage regulation.
Good comment re. grid inertia and reactive power.
Erik – Asynchronous generators, including batteries, can provide VARs. They can’t provide them if they aren’t generating though, which plant like hydro units can.
Eric,
inertia is something I think, possibly I’m wrong, is misunderstood. Physical inertia can be provided, at a cost, from rotarty condensers for example but inertia is only a damper. and slows rate of frequency variation. To correct further variation requires power to bring back the frequency to nominal, e.g. inertia slows a frequency droop when load is greater than supply but to prevent a further fall requires increasing fuel to a generator to increase supply input to the grid.
I’m convinced that many who say you can have artifical inertia do not really understand how the grid works?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Non inertial electrical sources cannot be made inertially stable by adding more. You just get a bigger failure when they eventually stop.
I’m pretty sure that doubling/tripling the ruinables at Broken Hill would not have solved their problems.
To scale up Wind and Solar you would need to install 3-6 times the wind capacity needed.
200MW of capacity (5.55…p) times load still couldn’t provide 36MW demand that’s less than an 18% capacity factor.
To supply the 36MW demand of Broken Hills they would need 1,111.11MW of installed wind capacity. That equates to 1,075MW of potential overcapacity when the wind does blow properly.
Solar with it’s dismal (10%ish) wintertime capacity factor would need to install at least 10 times required nameplate to get the needed generation from 10am till 2pm. To have any solar power available during peak demand would require additional GW of solar availability and the battery capacity to store it. Then in summer you will have a GLUT of solar overcapacity to deal with along with the Wind overcapacity.
Translation: How To Flush Money Down The Drain
So 9 times overbuild is not enough. How much then IS enough? 😉
Scale up RE and it merely fails harder. Germany and the UK are discovering this the hard way.
Any number multiplied by zero equals zero.
“U.S. electricity generation from wind turbines decreased for the first time since the mid-1990s in 2023 despite the addition of 6.2 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity last year. Data from our Power Plant Operations Report show that U.S. wind generation in 2023 totaled 425,235 gigawatthours (GWh), 2.1% less than the 434,297 GWh generated in 2022”. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61943
In other words, you can add thousands of wind turbines, but if the wind does not blow, it does not matter how many you have.
The UK just surpassed 7 terawatt-hours of wind power curtailed in 1 year…this year.
The previous maximum was 4.3 terawatt-hours – and that was last year.
The cost of this curtailment, this year is over 340 million GBP.
Again, the UK’s entire annual electricity consumption is under 270 terawatt-hours.
The amount of curtailment, relative to generation, is increasing with increased wind electricity production.
The utility of intermittent wind and solar PV generation, beyond a small fraction of overall generation, is a rapidly declining function.
More is not only not better, it is arithmetically increasingly worse.
Come on Nick! Explain to us how renewables are fully working already!
3…. 2…. 1…..
And, yes. Old Nick is weaving his tangled web below, yet again.
Opening sentence – did you mean October 2024?
Yep! Not too good coming out the chute, but hopefully more careful later.
Good article. Just an editing tip:
Your paragraph under the heading “There is often a big difference between theory and practice”, after your introductory line ending with “it was reported”, i.e. the paragraph that starts “There has been confusion”, should probably be indented, or italicized, or something, to indicate that this paragraph comes from the linked report (from reneweconomy.com.au).
You also left out what I think is the most important quote from that report, which follows the paragraph you quoted, and it goes as follows:
“But it also emerged that the Broken Hill battery had been deliberately disabled from providing this “islanding” service, under orders from transmission company Transgrid which had chosen instead to deliver those services through a new advanced compressed air storage project.
But that facility has not even begun construction, and won’t be built until 2027.”
Compressed air storage unit utilising unicorn farts.
The “compressed air battery” will be refilled daily from pipes placed in the ceiling of Parliament…where the greatest source of “Hot Air” can be found. Perhaps then town has f Broken Hill should rebrand themselves “Broke Wind”!
There are a number of areas I could have gone deeper. I referenced that you can argue a lot of things could have been different after an event to make this particular case better. They were using the battery for arbitrage. That benefit likely influenced the call for the battery. It also is good to keep it fully loaded for standby benefits. Can’t do both. Point made in the article Rud and I did on microgrids, these things can do a lot, but not all at the same time. No one knew when the outage was coming so the mode was not set for it, this allowed them to store and dispatch for economic advantage. But caught them with their pants down for an outage. Why didn’t they put in synchronous condensers earlier. They were worried about islanding. They made some tradeoffs. So for whatever reasons (maybe hope of the storage project to come). they did not. Would they have used that right or would it be low due to arbitrage. So much complexity and maximum benefits assumed from multiple contradictory uses. Chris Morris talks in comments at climate etc. on problem with syncons the area as well. Bottom line – always different ways to do things. Who has gotten them right? Broken Hill area spent a ton of money but didn’t. Most should conclude at least that it must be hard to near impossible.
Thanks for that .
remember this
https://esdnews.com.au/hornsdale-battery-fined-for-failing-to-provide-promised-power/
‘Between July and November 2019, Hornsdale Power Reserve made offers to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to provide contingency frequency control ancillary services (FCAS), which are used to keep the lights on following a power disturbance in the grid.”
Short story, they didnt when called on.
Wasnt ‘disabled’ at all.
Reserve back up has to be paid for , so for every minute of the day they get paid to sit around.
The energy company didnt want to pay for the standby reserve (probably used the grid transmission line reserve capacity …LOL)
The battery was however being used as quasi-generator to provide power at peak prices and charge itself at off peak prices . Arbitrage
Now that makes money !
This is alomost how all grid scale batteries operate . Some have a standby contract for say 10% of their capacity and the arbitarge the 90%
One grid battery in Victoria got caught batting for both teams ( a cricket term ) when the reserve capacity was suddenly called on ( only a short term) and there was none.. They were arbitraging the 100%
To be fair – 100MWh capacity vs. 17 MW standing load means that the battery could never supply more than 6 hours of outage. That small a relative replacement duration means this battery is primarily only used to shift solar mid-day power generated to the evening duck curve spike, and sometimes the overnight wind generation to the morning duck curve spike. It cannot handle anything else.
So there should have been even more spent than 650 million…
“Wasn’t disabled at all.”
Oh okay, well, I didn’t know that, all I know is what was reported in the Reneweconomy article that Russ referred to, and that was their terminology. Was the Reneweconomy article wrong? Or were they only “mostly” right? (90% right, in this case, according to your example) Because from that article, it didn’t sound like they even had 10% islanding capacity. It sounded like 0%, under orders from Transgrid.
Only electrical engineers seem to be aware that amperage and voltage get out-of-phase with non-resistive loads. Working, reliable power distribution systems need more than simply X MWh of power.
I.E. reliable electric power distribution need a source of controllable MVAR as well – VAR stands for Volt-Amperes Reactive.
Not to worry. The abundant electricity from renewables could be used to boil water to power conventional steam turbines.
/s
Indeed. There is that thingy called Power Factor. Don’t ask any Climate Alarmists to do the math involved tho’. It has cosine and other ugly trigonometric stuff. Icky.
~ Electrical Engineer BSEE 1988.
It is even worse than that. Imagine 10,000 inverters all running at 50 Hz (60 Hz) that are not synchronized. Inertia from large, huge armatures in a pretty small number of big plants keeps the AC waveforms synchronized in both frequency AND phase. Phase is important because you could end up with massive out of phase waveforms. Imagine one power plant putting out a sine wave, while a partner is on a cosine wave. What do you think will blow up first?
Now multiply that by the 10,000 inverters all free running and feeding power into a single grid point. Fiasco!
This is probably a silly question, but could the reference signal be provided by satellites?
NO. You have to be grid connected . The definition of an electrical grid is all in synch at the same frequency
What they have developed is frequency synch via inverters connected to grid batterys.
Most wind and solar inverters ‘follow’ the Hz signal… which means if its unstable they cant stabilise it.
These special inverters ‘lead’ the Hz signal so they attempt to restore any instability ( I hope I have that right)
This is fairly new and the inverter system connected to large scale batteries ( SA Hornsdale) has been found wanting when needed.
You’ve lost me there. 50Hz is incredibly slow in radio or computer terms, so a 50z (or 60 Hz if you prefer) reference shouldn’t be hard for the inverters to sync to.
After a bit of digging, it appears NTP may not be sufficiently accurate (10 ms or so) , but PTP should be (microsecond range)
That sounds vaguely like NTP, but just following a waveform instead of using timestamps. Latency will always be a problem following a waveform, of course.
The issue is NOT the time of the theoretical zero degree start of the sine wave, as you note, that would easily be able to be controlled. The problem is the cable runs and transformers in between, these all add specific phase changes to the equation, some are simple delay lines others can be a complete phase reversal. If you were to be exactly per the clock, then you would find currents flowing between generators, with one or more fighting for control. Cables get hot, transformers get hot and circuits would trip.
When syncing to the grid a local fueled generator will compare firstly it’s frequency, by adding or subtracting fuel it can raise or lower the frequency until it is a match to the grid. When at the same frequency, the phase is compared, if aligned, then a switch is thrown and the generator is on line, add more fuel and you are a generator, subtract fuel and you are a load, (a motor).
To get phase alignment you minutely adjust the fuel to slowly raise your frequency. If your phase drift is slow, eg a few degrees per second, then when at zero phase error you throw the switch. Since you were slightly fast, your generator will lock to the grid as a marginally small generator. If you had instead allowed your frequency to fall below the grid to align, then when the switch was thrown you’d be a load.
As always. Electronics can match frequency and phase almost instantly, they just look at what’s there and match it. To add more power, since they can’t turn up the fuel, they instead may try to advance the voltage wave, this will cause current to flow, like a spinning unit. The domestic, solar type inverter will try to add power to the grid by raising the voltage at their output. This will cause voltage to flow toward local loads in preference to the grid simply because the local inverter is at a higher voltage and a load will always draw power from a higher voltage before a lower one.
Thank you for the detailed explanation.
Now I remember why I didn’t do Elec. 🙂
Eng ian – to further confuse the issue (and why old cocky probably made a sensible career choice) for grids, you can have the situation that the voltage at the generator end is lower than the load end. It would create grid management issues in places like outback Australia like nighttime at Broken Hill at end of very long spur.
It would certainly give the transformer tap changers a good workout.
CS served me well for decades in IT.
Don’t worry. It will all work out just fine after green environmentalists tweak their plans a little more after learning to understand the newest systems better.
Reliable base load is just a false trap promoted by evil corporate polluters who want to kill off all the research into clean energy that will save the earth.
People need to reduce their pollution footprint on earth because the children are dying.
Whales, sea otters and polar bears are good but people are bad. Remember to drive 55 and turn your thermostat down.
“In October of 2025, the isolated small city of Broken Hill in New South Wales, Australia with a 36 MW load (including the large nearby mines) could not be reliably served by 200 MW of wind, a 53 MW solar array, significant residential solar, and a large 50 MW battery all supplemented by diesel generators.”
Schussler should know that it does not work like that. Although the Silverton wind farm and the solar array are fairly close to Broken Hill, they do not feed into the city’s distribution. Instead they feed in to the high voltage Transgrid network, from which BH normally derives its power. And that HV network was broken in the storm.
There was a lack of local synchronous generation, which should have been provided by the diesel generators. They failed. So the two systems that were meant to provide synchrony (NSW grid and diesel) failed.
The battery was also connected to Transgrid, not the microgrid. This could, with cost and effort, be fixed. Several commercial operators have to cooperate to do that. They did, but it took ten days.
It’s not surprising that the reality had very little relationship to the claims
OK three years ago, Mayor Turley was overly optimistic. That can happen.
However, when AGL finally agreed to connect it in to the local grid, it did work.
Sorry, Nick, but the story is morphing.
It appears it was a poorly designed system, with multiple single points of failure (that sounds contradictory, but isn’t)
It’s not my area, but I suspect a single 25MW diesel genset couldn’t provide sufficient inertia for the 37MW load, especially when 17MW of that load was large mine equipment.
The 50MW battery/inverter system probably could provide the inertia, but apparently wasn’t configured to work as a UPS. Once it was tweaked to either act as a UPS or synchronise phase with the diesel genset, it appears it did do the trick.
Not enough info provided by the original article or you, but that stuff is basic conceptual design.
“It appears it was a poorly designed system”
Well, that can happen too, although these were extraordinary circumstances. But it doesn’t say anything bad about wind or solar. They were working as intended.
A basic problem with the battery was just charging it. The only sources really were one wonky diesel and rooftop solar. There is a chicken/egg problem. The W&S can’t feed into any organised grid without a frequency to match to. Normally that is no problem.
The W&S&battery system was designed to work with Transgrid operating, as it almost always does. The BH local network was designed to take power from Transgrid, or failing that, from 2 25 MW diesel generators. Seems reasonable.
“Well, that can happen too,”
In fact ANY system with more than a small infection of wind and solar is, by definition, poorly designed.
They can work, if properly designed. They are unlikely to be optimal, though.
No, they can’t ! Grids cannot exist with out reliable supply systems.
It does say something bad about wind and solar. They were utterly useless without their reference signal.
The claim was that Broken Hill could be entirely carbon-free, and would work just fine without connection to the wider electricity grid.
All the components were in place, but the battery didn’t “click into operation”.
It was supposed to be two diesels (one of the single points of failure) which apparently weren’t running for standby (another SPOF).
If the two diesel gensets were operational, everything else was irrelevant.
It wouldn’t matter if the battery could charge or not, or how many wind generators or solar panels were available. Without a reference signal, none of them were any use.
If the system was designed to operate as claimed, the diesel gensets wouldn’t be needed. The battery/inverter would provide the reference signal into the islanded sub-grid, and all the rooftop solar, the large-scale solar and the wind generators would be available to feed the sub-grid and recharge the battery.
It’s only reasonable if you have no concept of failure modes, redundancy or resilience. If it was “designed” to run off 2 25MW diesel gensets as a first level failure mode, they needed at least 3 of them.
If the battery was supposed to “click in” as either a first or second level redundancy, it didn’t.
Russ’s point was that no amount of wind or solar is the slightest bit of use without robust support services.
“Russ’s point was that no amount of wind or solar is the slightest bit of use without robust support services.”
And it is nonsense. W&S, like all utility scale generators, feed into the HV transmission system. That fails very rarely. You might as well say that the NSW coal stations are not the slightest bit of use. They didn’t help here.
The mayor claimed that the battery would “click into operation” if an outage occurred. That didn’t happen.
The W&S were on the same HV segment as Broken Hill. Apparently BH is normally fed from that segment. If the battery worked as the mayor thought, the W&S would have continued to generate. It didn’t so they didn’t.
They aren’t the slightest bit of use to Broken Hill at the best of times. BH gets its HV electricity from South Australia.
The NSW coal stations were still working fine while BH was islanded.
“They aren’t the slightest bit of use to Broken Hill at the best of times. BH gets its HV electricity from South Australia.”
Nope. Transgrid is the NSW authority. Here is a map of the line and the storm location:
https://wattclarity.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/14aa1a-8fc79fec24994df284e5b87b3fa0bcf1mv2.webp
Here is the larger picture
The mayor may have been wrong.
Thanks for the update. The HV comes from SA and Vic, then.
According to a comment from stevekj, the mayor may well have been right at the time of the statement, then the system was b0rked by Transgrid later
There is an interstate interconnector from Berri to Red Cliffs and another from RC to Buronga. But normal supply is on the NSW network, also via Buronga.
Broken Hill is in NSW, so of course the HV lines are on the NSW network. Tesla’s aerial power transmission didn’t come to fruition. Even then, it would traverse NSW airspace.
However, I was referring to the source of the electricity, not the location of the lines. Because of the distances and line losses involved, much of southern NSW’s electricity comes from Vic, and much of northern NSW’s electricity from Qld.
OC what you say can often be seen in the grid interconnectors. Power flowing one way on one line and the other interconnector shows reverse flow.
If you are looking at the source of electrons., when Broken Hill is importing, I suspect they come from the lignite steamers via Red Cliffs interconnector
Wind and solar FAIL a very large amount of the time.
Solar only works a maximum of 8 hours a day, totally useless at night
Wind FAILS whenever there is no wind.
NSW coal fired power often supplies 90%+ of NSW electricity.
Wind and solar often provided absolutely NOTHING. !
But the design failed didn’t it? who designed the system, the Marx brothers? It is obvious that component engineers were not used with a design goal of RELIABILITY.
Did you not understand what Old Cocky said about tying a 25 MW diesel generator into a 37 MW load? How long do you think it take for that generator to trip off line. These aren’t light switches. Going into a dead start situation is a nightmare. You have to begin with matching load to generation. That means tripping all kinds of transmission and distribution lines to allow the 1st system to manage the load that is presented.
Too many folks just don’t have training to know what occurs on the high voltage and high current lines. It isn’t child’s play. It is DANGEROUS.
Here is an image of folks in a medium voltage station. Look closely at the protective suits they are wearing in case there is a massive arc flash as connections are made or disconnected.
“Did you not understand what Old Cocky said about tying a 25 MW diesel generator into a 37 MW load?”
Did you not understand that there were supposed to be 2 25 MW generators?
As to start-up, the one working generator did start up, and limped along.
The systems that failed were the HV transmission lines and then the diesel generators. Not renewables.
There was no electricity coming from renewables…
… the ultimate FAILURE.
It doesn’t really sound like it did limp along.
reads very much like it overloaded and tripped out.
It’s very, very unusual for a diesel motor to run for a few minutes and then just give up the ghost, then repeat the exercise. It’s possible if there was algae buildup in the fuel and the filters kept blocking, but that would require a rather extreme lack of maintenance, and no alternative source of diesel. It’s not hard to bring a fuel trailer in.
Generators with proper safety devices don’t limp. If the generator can’t provide the demanded current it will trip. Otherwise, the diesel engine will begin to slow down reducing frequency and the voltage will drop causing brownouts. At some point, something will burn up and stop anyway.
You simply can’t throw a light switch and put a generator capable of only 25 MW onto a load demanding 37 MW, it just won’t work.
That isn’t what I heard Nick. Trying to run a synchronous generator into a line oversupplied with uncontrolled rooftop generation gives no end of operational difficulties – system security stuff, not MW.
That seems a reasonable proposition, at least during the day.
How did the system perform overnight?
I don’t know. As often happens in an event like this where there is likely to be very large liability claims, everyone who has actual knowledge on what caused it and why has to keep silent – company mandates to protect the shiny suits. Compare what was said when Callide happened to what came out 18 months latter as a very good example.
This shows exactly how much you know about the electric grid. How do you think a generator LIMPS along? If a generator can not supply the load, something has to give. Voltage, frequency, load, something. If the generator stayed connected running at full power, then load had to have been shed, i.e., blackout conditions for some.
Diesel generators are finicky creatures. They are not known to be reliable beasts. It doesn’t surprise me that one of two was not operational. However, it also demonstrates that proper engineering was not done in relation to single point failures.
Nothing you have said refutes anything I have said. It certainly sounds like proper planning was ignored as to possible failure conditions whereby a prearranged crisis plan was immediately available for reference.
Old Cocky, surely you’re not suggesting that these “all eggs in one basket w&s supply” developments haven’t been thought through thoroughly?
The frustrating thing is that it could and should have worked, if it had been designed to do what the Broken Hill Mayor claimed.
update: It’s essentially what data centres were doing by at least the early 1990s – UPS to take over seamlessly for 1 – 2 hours in the event of an outage while the backup power supply kicks in. We had diesel gensets, this would have W&S, with diesel gensets as a fallback.
A comment from stevekj above explains how they managed to stuff it up.
“was overly optimistic”
The whole wind solar grid thing is always massively over-optimistic.
Basically just a huge FANTASY !!
Nick The battery is connected to the 22kV network in the Broken Hill Switchyard.
In almost all operational modes Broken Hill is a grid import point – power goes from Broken Hill south.
Cost and effort could make any Rube Goldberg device operate. Why would you want to?
Isolated micro-grids would be better off supplying DC power, where the individual generating units just need to monitor voltage. The equivalent of inertia can be provided by capacitors and the current (hence power) supplied would vary inversely with voltage. An example of voltage control would be nominal power output at 100% of voltage setpoint, zero power output at say 105% of voltage setpoint.
High voltage semiconductors have advanced to the point where a small DC grid would be relatively easy to implement. Designing inverters to just supply local loads is much easier than designing a grid connected inverter.
That’s a great idea, let’s use DC for all power in the house and industry. All we have to do now is get rid of everything that doesn’t have the capacity for a DC input.
So AC motors would have to be binned. Damn, this could get expensive. All those power tools, (not the battery type), bin them too. All the domestic freezers, fridges, etc that don’t have inverter technology, bin them too.
And then we can start on the safety aspects. Would you like to take a guess at where the voltage for your protective earth wire will reside? At present it is tied to your neutral wire and the line voltage oscillates positive and negative around it. This means that the average voltage of the neutral and the joined earth wire is zero. Even a relatively weak earthing point can maintain that. Now look at the DC version. The earth wire is tied to, (let’s say), the negative wire on the DC circuit. That means that the earth is ALWAYS held at the line voltage difference away from the earth. This will induce a voltage drop, cause corrosion of your earth point, and will, (where the earth point is weak), allow the voltage on the earth to drift away from zero volts, In the worst case the earth will be half the DC potential negative ALL the time. If someone were to hold a well earthed tap fitting and touch a DC earthed appliance, then the current will flow, through the earthed appliance to the tap fitting, probably via your right arm, your chest and your left arm. I think this would be bad.
I read that as saying that the generating sources feed DC into a substation, which has the inverters and control circuitry.
That sounds similar to the UPS bank and diesel generators in a data centre.
FWIW, I am very familiar with the electrolysis problems from 600VDC street railways – problems were well know in the 1890’s. The optimal way to distribute DC is via a balanced 2 wire network, with ground fault detection. I would also have galvanic isolation between the distribution network and the customer utilization lines – think DC equivalent of a transformer. Using a DC-DC “transformer” would make short circuit current limiting much easier than the present AC supply. It may be better to supply the customer with the national AC supply, e.g. 120/240VAC/60 Hz for the US & Canada.
How long and how much to implement this? There is a reason for using AC for distribution.
The equipment required, i.e., transformers basically, are pretty reliable. I would have to look up the mean time to failure but I’m sure it is a long period. Not sure what your solid state system would have, but my guess is that it would not be as reliable by a long shot.
A well designed solid state transformer should last at least a couple of decades. It would likely be more susceptible to damage from high voltage transients than a conventional distribution transformer. It would also be smaller and lighter than a 50/60 Hz transformer with a similar rating.
The vast majority of existing home appliance is intended for AC. Many do have electronics and DC circuits but they are all designed for AC supply.
Switching DC with conventional air gap switches is also a challenging issue.
Many Australian homes could operate economically off-grid now and it is a growing trend but still a small number. None of those going off-grid use DC appliances apart from a few holiday shacks that are more like camping out or caravans than conventional residential houses. The world has adapted to AC power supply and the appliances on offer for AC offer good value.
What the promoters of the transition in Australia have not yet realised is that grid scale intermittent generation offers no benefit of scale but is burdened by high cost of transmission and stability services. Households that can get the capital will go off-grid and get lower cost electricity.
The notion that the grid is necessary is obviously wrong because you only need look at every ship on the ocean to see these are all working off-grid. The grid developed to take advantage of scale and locate generators at the fuel source (on coal mines).
The fundamental error was thinking that distributed intermittent generation would offer value to an existing grid designed for large generators sited on coal mines.
“Switching DC with conventional air gap switches is also a challenging issue.”
Most certainly. OTOH, GE made a circuit breaker designed to interrupt 7 to 10kA at 3kVDC circa 1917-18.
At what cost? DC contactors are quite complicated although they don’t appear so.
Pre-chopper DC electric locomotives would have 1 to 3 dozen contactors for switching series resistance in/out, changing motor configurations, e.g. full series, series-parallel and full parallel. Some of these contactors could open a circuit drawing 700+ amps from a 3kVDC supply.
One option is a two stage contactor where the first is in parallel with a current limiting resistor, and the second opens on a greatly reduced current.
Think about what volumes you are discussing here.
220v * 200a = 44,000va for one house.
44000 / 3000 = 16a current on HV line
700 / 16 = 45 houses
So how many of these would be required? How would one control them, that is, open and shut them? Who would decide what contactors would be opened and shut?
Here’s screenshot from openNEM showing the recent performance of South Australia’s much vaunted wind powered grid. Note that on the cursored night for 15 hours the grid was 95% powered by gas and imported coal power. The previous day as regularly advertised wind supplied >100%.
So, if they were going to keep the power on overnight they need 15 hours times 1.5 GW, 22.5 GWh of batteries. This will cost around $45 Billion. That’s about 1/3 of annual state government expenditure and would have to be repeated every 10-15 years. It’s also about 1% of the entire global annual battery manufacturing capacity, to provide one night’s power for 2 million people. Battery production is expected to double by 2030, but then other first world countries claim to be going down the wind+solar+storage path, so they will need to buy batteries as well.
Your plot leaves off rooftop solar, which carried a large part of the load.
The purple is imports. They need a bigger interconnector. They are building one.
WRONG…
They DO NOT need an interconnect, they need to produce more REIABLE electricity of their own.
They are lucky to have such a large amount of GAS fired electricity available, but more be a huge benefit.
You are saying they need more reliance of BROWN COAL from Victoria.
Well done, dopey !!
A very informative, eye-opening expose, Russ and Chris.
It’s more confirmation of what has been observed for many years now –
there is NOT ONE country, state, region, city, municipality, town or village anywhere in the world that has been able to run uninterrupted 24x7x52 continuous electricity supplied solely from wind & solar generation.
How long has this lunacy been attempted?
Over 3 decades now by my reckoning.
The Vestas plant in Colorado is not even powered by it’s own bird chopping product.
The devil is in the details that the average person is not aware of. Most people believe if they have PV panels they’ll have electricity when the grid goes down and the sun is shining.
Broken Hill found out when the grid connection went down the local battery storage wouldnt recharge soley from solar , it needed a….. stable grid in operation as well
They were saved by the old diesel generators which were the standby in old days when they had their own fossil fuel turbine generators.
The Diesel generators wouldnt work nicely with solar either -a remote pacific island Niue found this out too.
So it was power cuts for most and power for some, but you never know which !
Instead of inverters why not use DC motors attached to AC Generators with huge freaking flywheels between them. That could supply inertia and synchrony. It is probably less efficient than inverters but it is better than grid collapse.
You’ve never messed with motor/generators have you? Do you have any idea how big a DC motor would be? Go look at the generator in a baseload power plant.
We had a 5 hp DC motor generator in the lab so we could learn how they work. It was the size of a V6 Ice motor and probably weighed more.
At grid-scale sizes, very large-scale DC to AC conversion using large motor-generator units will work technically. But only at horrifically poor efficiency and at huge dollar expense.
But here’s the argument for doing it this way: If your grid-scale renewable energy system is 6X or 10X overbuilt wind and solar backed by massive battery storage, the entire RE system is already horrifically inefficient and expensive.
In the grand scheme of things, using DC to AC motor generator units makes an already horrifically inefficient and expensive RE system somewhat more horrifically inefficient and expensive.
If your firm objective is to electrify everything using overbuilt wind and solar massively backed by batteries, then you simply don’t care what it will eventually cost to do that.
I agree the cost would be outrageous. My objection is simply the size of the units you are talking about.
1MW is about 1300 hp. So 1300*35= ~45,000 hp That’s about 9000 times bigger than the little motor I learned on. A diesel locomotive is ~5000 HP so 9 locomotives? Crazy.
I don’t see any technical reason why such large DC to AC motor units couldn’t be built and made to run reliably. Justifying their use within the context of a massively overbuilt and expensive RE-powered grid system is a whole different matter, of course.
The problem is that you need a DC motor AND an AC generator. In essence, you are exchanging a steam generator for driving power for a DC motor. The problem is where does the power for the DC motor come from? Batteries? How do you charge the batteries? Solar? How about at night?
Yes, you need a huge DC motor coupled to a huge AC generator. Several vendors would be happy to design and manufacture such a beast, if you hand them enough money.
And if there isn’t enough mass in the rotating elements to supply the rotational inertia required for grid stabilization, you add a flywheel of appropriate size into the rotational mix.
How would the huge DC motors inside the DC-to-AC motor-generator units be powered?
These are powered from a huge wind & solar grid system which is 6X or 10X nameplate overbuild and which is supported by massive battery storage.
On days when sufficient wind & solar capacity is available, the power is fed directly to the DC-to-AC motor-generators. During periods when there isn’t sufficient power available directly, it is drawn from battery storage.
It’s a conceptually easy solution. (Conceptually.) But one which costs lots and lots of money.
We had something very similar at UC Berkeley when I was there. in the 70’s I did a couple power systems labs and an electrical machinery lab – fun stuff. For the power systems labs we had some 3 phase reactors that were used to simulate relatively short lines – short meaning that the line can be modeled by series inductance and parallel capacitance.
What was really impressive was watch and hearing the MG sets response to simulated line faults. About a month after the spring quarter ended, I was in the control room at Yellowtail dam (four 65MW water turbines) when a nearby line fault occurred – the sound from the generators was much more impressive than what I heard in the lab.
Watching the TRIGA that was on the campus do a 1.2GW pulse was also impressive.
I was at Kansas University at about the same time. Graduated in 1972 with a BSEE.
That’s great, Jim, but maybe you should have taken some physics courses while you were there! Then you might have learned what “work” means, or what “photons” are, and how to answer theoretical questions that don’t involve “equations” or “references” 😉
It does stand to reason that if you made it all the way into your mid-70s without knowing what a “theoretical question” means, there’s no chance I’m going to be able to teach it to you now.
I guess we can also conclude that Kansas U’s BSEE program is pretty much the bottom of the barrel if they didn’t even teach you the very concept of a “theoretical question”, never mind any actual physics, or even how to avoid contradicting yourself and then lying about it – followed, of course, by insulting anyone who points this out. Are you planning to apologize for any of that reprehensible behaviour any time soon?
Especially when the wind farms can’t find bidders/buyers:
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/denmark-disappointed-after-offshore-wind-tender-draws-no-bids-2024-12-05/
This is so stupid, even some of the smallest nuclear reactors could have provided constant and reliable power for this town and mine with power to spare and no disruption to the grid.
I worked in the power industry for over a decade. All the dim politicians, green fanboys, academics, etc. don’t understand the realities of physical power systems operation and management. Australia is heading for a disaster. They will not avoid a calamity as they are determined to remove the conventional rotating machinery across Australia as the article suggests.
I haven’t worked in the power industry but did take some undergraduate power systems courses and labs. I would have to say that a lot, if not most, EE’s do not really understand electric power systems. It would safe to say that non-EE’s are likely to have an even poorer understanding of power systems.
I’ve got a pdf of a scan of a early 1920’s edition of “The Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers” and there were a number of paragraphs about dealing with intermittency of hydro-electric plants. Bottom line was the utilities should plan on back-up generation.
Actually, it isn’t at all common to see articles, propaganda, or commercial announcements that state watt/hours provided, at specific times, and against local mean system load. It is also rare to see how much that electricity cost to the transmission grid operator.
Has anyone done a deep dive into Babcock Ranch, FL? https://babcockranch.com/
“We’re America’s first solar-powered town, and we’re pretty passionate about it. From our 870-acre solar farm, to solar tree charging stations, to the country’s largest solar-plus-battery storage system, renewable energy is a part of everyday life at Babcock Ranch”.
They claim to be 100% solar with batteries – no connection to the grid. It looks to be very expensive, but they claim to have survived Hurricane Ian with no loss of power or damage to their solar farm and of course the BBC and other media claim that Babcock Ranch is hurricane proof.
The town appears to have survived Milton as well according to the NY Post. https://nypost.com/2024/10/16/us-news/how-hurricane-proof-town-of-babcock-ranch-escaped-milton/
The town was designed from the ground up to withstand hurricanes – all homes are built to withstand 150 mph winds and the electrical infrastructure is underground.
There is a lot of media hype about the town, but the hype tends to miss the point that this town was built specifically to withstand hurricanes from the ground up and the cost to live there is quite high.
Being very much a lay person, I am hoping someone here can add some more commentary re: pros & cons and scalability.
Solar has zero ability to respond to load demand and wind generation has very liitle. Source output has to be exactly equal to load demand in any electrical circuit at all times. This alone makes it impossble for a system like that to work. The frequency problems are just added on to that. The batteries are just a joke.
You cannot power a load with a source that does not respond to demand.