Broken Hill Solar Plant | Photo by Jeremy Buckingham
By Jo Nova
The lights went out in Broken Hill. A storm blew seven transmission towers over disconnecting the area from the national grid on October 17th. About 19,000 people live there, and with a 200MW wind plant, a 53MW solar array and a big battery, plus diesel generators it was assumed they’d be OK for a while without the connection to the big baseload plants, but instead it’s been a debacle. They’ve had nearly a week of blackouts with intermittent bursts of power, barely long enough to charge the phone.
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 and hopefully the schools will reopen today. But the full reconnection will not happen until November 6th.
Western NSW blackout ‘a green power warning’
By Joanna Panagopououlos and Alexi Demetriadi, The Australian
Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without baseload power.
“(Wind and solar) are worse than useless (in a crisis like this), because it’s detrimental to having a consistent power supply,” he said. “I’d hate to see what happens in the capital cities in a similar crisis.”
The bad news is that when there is no reliable 50Hz baseload supplier of electricity, the solar panel inverters just don’t mesh well with the diesel generators. The frequency of the diesel generators varies slightly as the load changes, and these fluctuations cause issues with solar inverters, which need a stable frequency to synchronize properly.
Hence, in a blackout, the solar panels were not just useless, they were a threat to the system, so people were asked to switch them off:
Essential Energy on Friday was urging customers in Broken Hill to switch off their solar supply main switch to protect the 40-year-old backup gas-turbine generator providing power to the town and surrounds.
From within Broken Hill, a forlorn Jack Marx is dotting out his story in The Australian via his phone:
Broken Hill: Powerless and left to live like mushrooms
…Broken Hill, has been in blackout for five days.
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.
The unreliable generators survived the storm but were still useless. Giles Parkinson suspects (fervently hopes) that this is just a bureaucratic issue, rather than a technical one:
Broken Hill has a wind farm, a solar farm and a big battery. So, why are the lights out?
Giles Parkinson, RenewEconomy
The fact that the wind farm and the solar farm aren’t operating with the transmission line is understandable. But the big battery is supposed to be – and that could in turn have allowed the wind and solar to produce. No one is saying what’s gone wrong, but many suspect it’s a matter of oversight rather than technology.
“You need to talk to Transgrid,” said one. “You should talk to Essential,” says another. “Ah, that’s AGL’s asset, you better talk to them.” And then. “No, Tilt Renewables own those. Give them a ring.” And finally, “we don’t have an official statement now, but we are trying to sort it.”
It certainly was mismanaged. But that’s just it, isn’t it? A decentralized grid has a million moving parts, and thousand agencies that can all screw up together. Complexity has a cost. But it’s not just mismanagement,a wind and solar system is not just expensive, but lacks inherent stability. Sure, eventually, if we hock the nation we can find a way, but why? To make storms nicer in a hundred years?
Solar power is not just superfluous, it’s toxic
The big Broken Hill battery finally restarted on Saturday to help the town cope with the evening peaks in demand for electricity. But the intrinsic problem remains in these remote communities, erratic solar power doesn’t work well with diesel gens, and everything needs to be fully backed up in any case. As we saw in Alice Springs, it didn’t take much solar power, for one big cloud to cause a blackout. The Northern Territory was so scarred by that blackout in 2019, they’ve left 4 solar plants sitting there idle ever since, in fear they’ll crash the Darwin-Katherine grid.
So much money and so little to show for it:
Even with a price tag, our renewables future is already broken
Nick Cater, The Australian
The Silverton Wind Farm and Broken Hill Solar plant were supposed to produce enough electricity to power 117,000 homes. They’re supported by AGL’s 50MWh battery facility at Pinnacles Place, one of the largest in Australia. Yet Broken Hill, population 19,000, has been in a semi-permanent state of blackout since a storm brought down the transmission line connecting the town to the east coast grid.
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.
Instead of spending $650 million dollars on solar and wind and a battery, we could have bought two brand new useful diesel generators for every remote town in Australia, and then when transmission towers fall down, they won’t be left in the dark.
“the solar panels were not just useless, they were a threat to the system, so people were asked to switch them off”
And in other states, the energy company turns them off anyway.
So much for solar as backup power in an emergency. Or the absurdity of free money for solar. Your investment is worth zero if you are not allowed use your solar. And half that cost was paid by everyone else, who lost their money too thanks to STC certificates.
Meanwhile the country is building endless transmission lines to places where no one lives, another 30,000km of them, but Broken Hill relies on just one. And who pays for all these transmission lines? You do. Transmission lines we would not need without wind farms.
But you can sleep nights, knowing that spending billions a year on doubled electricity prices, Australia’s CO2 is within 1% of China which produces 60% of the world’s iron, with our coal. All thanks to our great sacrifices. We are saving the world. Even if the effect of emissions on world CO2 is absolutely zero.
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In the RenewEconomy article, regarding the 50MW Broken Hill battery installed to support the local grid in the event of such an emergency:
“Was the technology not ready, or was it not capable?“
Great question. We can only hope RenewEconomy pursue the answer with objectivity and intent
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It’s an interesting question. The big battery uses grid forming inverters which can perform a system start, but can these inverters do the job of a big spinning flywheel ?. I’m thinking the answer is “NO” as they still need to derive their frequency from the grid. In this case you have thousands of small residential inverters all trying to synch themselves to what they see coming from the grid, which is the thousands of small inverters and a few larger ones. In the case of Broken Hill, it’s possible that the residential solar systems have enough grid dominance during high sun hours and overwhelm the ability of the main RE grid inverters to stabilise their frequency, which would make it possible for the system frequency to start wandering. If you have a big coal plant that can provide frequency control ancillary services it’s obviously not a problem. Let’s hope the outage report doesn’t get sanitised to hide an inconvenient truth.
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I would love to see the mathematical model but what was discovered in South Australia is that a battery has the ability to stabilize the grid. Otherwise you get creeping runaway because each source is watching the grid, effectively watching the next in the line. But the electronics of the conversion from DC to AC for the big battery is not using an average phase from the grid as a circular reference but a quartz clock as an absolute reference like a precision metronome. It so depends on the logic of the DC/AC phase from the battery. Are they all sheep watching each other or is one a collie dog?
Otherwise a phase shift can creep in a positive feedback loop causing a runaway collapse as each shuts down to avoid phase damage in a catastrophic collapse. So a source of near infinite instantaneous capacity has the ability to provide the invariate reference beat or direction, equivalent to the biggest power generator with the highest momentum, like a huge rotor. The question is whether the battery is big enough to do this and whether the battery converter logic is to follow or to lead with the certainty of a clock. In a traditional grid, the sheer momentum of the biggest generator does this because it is mechanically impossible to change given the angular momentum or inertia of the biggest rotor. I expect a big battery uses this logic and so stops catastrophic phase runaway.
The analogy is a long line of the high kicking rockettes and each girl is watching the one next to her as opposed to watching a single lead. Like an orchestra too with a conductor.
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Cheers Serge and TdeF, very insightful. Such topics are outside my wheelhouse but l try and educate myself. Don’t think l can say the same thing about people who call Canberra their workplace
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What happens when the big rotating turbines come back on line? What then acts as the master phase device?
I cannot avoid thinking that a SMR or SNR, located reasonably close to the town to reduce the need for long transmission lines, would be the eventual answer to these types of problems.
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The big spinning turbines have inertia. When you start up a coal plant at systems start, you need to wait some time for the turbines to reach their spinning frequency (50hz) before reconnecting to the grid. Remember, these turbines weigh around 500 tons each. When you start adding the load incrementally it will cause the turbines to start slowing down so you then crank up the heat and pressure in the boilers to compensate as you gradually bring the system back. It’s the inertia in the spinning turbines that allows the system to cater for the initial surge and come back online gracefully.
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I’m only guessing here, but the clues are that the system didn’t restart in island mode and we do know that people are being asked to turn off their rooftop solar systems. If a system start occurs during the day, and power starts to be delivered from the grid solar array, battery and diesel generators, this will cause people’s rooftop solar to turn back on as they are configured to shut down when the grid is down. This sudden surge of additional export generation would be problematic for the system and would likely prevent the start up. If they tried to start up the system at night using diesel and battery alone, then they would need sufficient diesel generation to run the entire system (assuming a worse case of low or flat battery), including the initial start-up surge. My guess is that they don’t have sufficient diesel capacity and considered that a system start should be done during the day when the grid solar array is running, but they didn’t factor in the effect of the rooftop solar coming online all at once causing the system to trip back off. If you extrapolate this issue to our main grid, then it probably spells trouble when we remove our big coal plants and face widespread transmission failures and outages.
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2016 was good preview for our “renewable” economy.
Early in the year Tassie lost it’s undersea cable, right when they were
running out of water. So they brought in 150 diesel generators to help.
Tassie was lucky that they were able to off-load those diesel generators
to South Australia later in the year (October) when they had several wind “farms” conk out
with some inter-connector towers blowing over.
Do not forget that South Australia blew up their perfectly good coal fired power stations
to spite every South Australian.
That’ll learn ’em.
Eight years to get it right, and they still fail.
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I guess you reap what you sow. Bowen take note.
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Unfortunately David, Bowen won’t take note, at least not until we have a major blackout in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra.
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And of course, Canberra runs on “100% renewables”, or so they say. But their grid power comes from NSW, which has coal and gas generation.
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How much of Canberra’s “renewable” power came from Broken Hill?
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My commiserations to the people of Broken Hill who are the current crash test dummies as intermittent electricity generation demostrates its inherent weaknesses.
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The answer of course is more wind and solar , Bowen and the ABC will be already working out their talking points and will be blaming coal for the problem.
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Gas, it’s the dodgy gas generator. More solar more wind. I can see Bowen’s speech now
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Imagine if the staggering amounts of money Australia has thrown away on wind, solar and Big Battery plantations had actually been spent on something useful.
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Again if you can’t reliably supply a big town of thousands of people, then how do you supply big cities with millions of people at risk?
We must only build reliable base-load energy for our future and forget about unreliable, toxic W & S.
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Renewable energy is safe and effective.
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and reliable and cheap and scalable and commandable and adequate and safe for the bats and eagles, raptors and whales and dolphins and only requires 1000x the land and 30x the transmission lines and associated land and just looks great on our dramatic cliffs and sea vistas and an asset in huge clearings in National Parks. And of course every 20 years all has to be totally replaced. Which is why they are called renewables.
And the old extremely toxic panels and blades have to be buried, exempted as they are from our environmental laws which otherwise would make them illegal. But that’s an environmental disaster for another generation, a legacy if you will.
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TdeF
Re “And the old extremely toxic panels and blades have to be buried, exempted as they are from our environmental laws which otherwise would make them illegal. But that’s an environmental disaster for another generation, a legacy if you will.
Your riddle of the morning –
When is vegetation not vegetation?
When you are a wind or solar developer with a project in Qld who’s development clearing is outside the Vegetation Management Act
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Yes, Green projects are always exempted from environmental controls. The hypocrisy is astounding. After all, the sky is falling‘.
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Again, does any sane govt really think we should be wasting trillions of $ on unreliable toxic W & S + toxic batteries for decades into the future?
See Bloomberg expert group’s costings + their ABC + Aussie net zero donkeys.
After about every 15 to 20 years we’d have to replace the toxic mess again and again.
Don’t Aussies also have a right to ask why we’d want to destroy thousands of klms of our environments both onshore and offshore and for zero change to our climate or temp by 2050 or 2100?
Surely Aussies aren’t as insane as Labor, Greens and the Teals?
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Neville,
No they are not insane they have just swallowed the BS their ABC and fellow propagandist have been feeding them for the last 20 years.
Until the chickens come home to roost and it effects them and a major city they will keep their collective heads in the sand with their fingers into their ears going la la la
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And quite a few Liberals don’t forget. John Ruddick said he is amazed to find how obsessed all NSW politicians are about climate change.
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To paraphrase BB King’s mournful song:
“The Hill has gone,
Broken Hill has gone, blacked-out again”
Free power causes rotten meat, save the planet and lose your fridge: all the school children with time on their hands could be out protesting Climate Justice Now! Save Our Freezers! My Phone Is Dead… help.
Talking of ‘October Surprises’, your veritable high priests are forecasting ‘snow to 1,000m’ for Tasmania 31 Oct, aka Halloween, and for the following day, 1 Nov (the official commencement of Cyclone Season), more snow with below-freezing overnight temps.
Do not feel alone, however, as on the same day, the beginning of Cyclone Season, NZ’s Mt Cook is in for ‘snow showers’ with a max of -11 and windchill down to -27. Thank you Broken Hill, your action has spared us the horrors of a mild, pleasant, Spring day.
PS. Oh no, the UN has sanctified 1 Nov as ‘World Vegan Day’ – you’ve got to be choking!
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better get some more diesel in to power my generator – the big blackout is coming
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If storing diesel beware of algae. I recently filled my diesel excavator with fuel from an old 20 litre plastic gerry can and the machine stopped. It took a while to find the string of green snot gathered up against the fuel tap/ water dropper assembly. I now cycle all stored fuels after a couple of months and add a naphthalene based fuel conditioner.
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It’s worse in a boat. We had algae in the tank whilst 10 miles offshore. We replaced the clogged fuel filters with the spares an continued on until those clogged too. We had to wait about 12 hours until the wind come in and we were able to sail safely into Port Stephens.
Many diesel systems include a fuel polishing system to cycle fuel through filters to remove impurities like algae so the fuel will be good when needed.
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A debacle it certainly is but not one without precedent! Even before copious wind and solar intermittent power the lower half of Queensland suffered a similar fate! Adelaide too! power stored in expensive batteries is no panacea. Only electricity generated 24/7 can provide the required juice of normal life.
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Power in SA was only restored after the transmission line from Victoria was started again. It required several days to get each separate “capacity” to start up.
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Old town gas network of pipes posing a lethal threat to construction crews in Hobart and Launceston
And we think obsolete wind towers and solar arrays are a problem! At least they are visible. Ugly but visible. Old gas is both lethal and invisible.
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Presumably when the wind generators and solar panels reach the end of their working life Australia will at least have the coal and iron ore to send to China to make the steel which they can buy to build their replacements.
I can’t see wind and solar powering the manufacture of their replacements or the batteries, or of any of the goods that people need for a modern lifestyle.
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Not just industrial production.
How would you feel, taken by ambulance to hospital for urgent cardiac surgery, at midnight with no wind blowing?
And with diesel rationed because of shipping problems.
Can a quadruple bypass, or repairs to a torn aorta, be done by candlelight?
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“Can a quadruple bypass, or repairs to a torn aorta, be done by candlelight?”
The answer is “Yes”
The next question is “Will it be successful?”
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This is really interesting.
I sure hope that you guys can come up with a detailed follow up some time of precisely what the problems faced by the locals were and how best to over come them. There seem to be more “Doomsday Preppers” out there that ever – and there is a real need for some detailed How To manuals.
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Good idea.
Can we tap into the first hand experiences of the disaster to get ideas on prepping for our turn that won’t be far away.
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Might as well learn something useful from this disaster.
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Somebody else has to do that. We knew.
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Yes
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This terrible situation has occurred in the wrong town.
Canberra promotes itself as “100% renewable” powered.
It’s a great pity that the transmission towers connecting Canberra to the grid weren’t the ones that failed.
If the power went out in Canberra we could hope that the politicians, bureaucrats and public serpents wouldn’t be able to inflict any more stupid ideas on the gullible public.
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I wrote something similar in 2.1.1 above. If the “100% renewable” grid from NSW went awol the ACT would see immediately just how wonderful their “renewables” are. Could lead to a change of portfolios for he of the “if you don’t like our policies don’t vote for us” Bowen.
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Solar power is not just superfluous, it’s toxic
The solar panel inverters just don’t mesh well with the diesel generators was not taught at primary school . I spent nearly 60 years with a screwdriver and multimeter but it did not click in my head until I read it here this morning.
I do not know what David Crisafulli did before 2012 but I suspect he had interests in humanities.
Maybe it is a good chance for more active bloggers here to start educating him on link between technology and economy… Nowadays you do miracles with software but there $$$ attached to any sophisticated solution to simple problems.
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Isn’t that similar to wind turbines and electricity transmission grid?
Why the “renewables” lobby and now Labor transition wants to build a duplicate but changed specifications main electricity transmission grid for renewables efficiency?
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If you are not making your own electricity then this paragraph sums up why you should be placing it at the top of your to-do list:
Of course Blackout Bowen is not even given a mention.
On my second stint involved with Broken Hill after it was connected to the grid with a line the mines paid for, my boss of the day would be on the phone with the States Mines and Energy Minister asking when would power be up in these circumstances and how much royalty would the State forego for their lack of supply. He never missed an opportunity to seek compensation from suppliers for their lack of service.
You can bet that household insurance premiums in Broken Hill are going to increase again.
Have the HSC exams started yet?
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There was also a backup to the emergency generator, but it wasn’t repaired from a year earlier….
And “they” forgot that Broken hill keeps to Croweater time.
Maybe “they” will realise that stocks of components to assemble emergency transmission towers should be held, plus suitable craneage.
But it is just a mining town….
West of Bourke.
A bit like Kalgoorlie.
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On a Wednesday page (23/10/24) I posted “Looking at the AEMO ” Price and demand” prediction for South Australia today.” “So what happens if there is way too much generation? That is the battery is charged, the gas and diesel generators are off, the interconnectors are at max, then the wind suddenly blows extra hard and the sun gets active as the clouds part.”
The result was several helpful comments with good clues from people who obviously have good electrical theory but still did not see the problem. Possibly unaware that i studied analogue electronics engineering and worked for an electrical utility for 8 years. After some research and watching what happens, it seems S.A. aims for a minimum gas generation of around 80MW and also avoids the other two situations. The gas fired state does not ever seem to turn it off.
Joanna Panagopououlos and Alexi Demetriadi answer well.
“(Wind and solar) are worse than useless (in a crisis like this), because it’s detrimental to having a consistent power supply,” he said. “I’d hate to see what happens in the capital cities in a similar crisis.”
S.A. is again looking interesting at minimum demand, exporting and importing for stability 28/10/24
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The linked chart will give you a better understanding of what is happening in SA:
http://nemlog.com.au/graphs/co2e_sa_yesterday_today.png
You will see yesterday that rooftops (yellow line) peaked at just under 2000MW. There was a bit of wind. A minuscule amount of gas and a bit of grid solar at midday all being notionally exported as the pink line shows. The black demand curve went negative a few times but the export to Victoria maintained local grid power generation.
SA has the synchronous condensers that provide sub-second frequency control. The problem with Broken hill is that there are no synchronous condensers and the two 25MW gas turbine probably lack the required inertia for stability. Batteries are good for 6 second surges but no rotating inertia for the sub-second requirements. It may be that the gas turbines are just not suited to frequency stabilising.
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The interconnector to Tasmaina has been at zero a long time. Wonder if today is not typical.
https://nemlog.com.au/graphs/co2e_tas_yesterday_today.png
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Oops. Tasmania.
Still at zero. N.S.W. to Vic also at zero but changing often.
https://aemo.com.au/Energy-systems/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-NEM/Data-Dashboard-NEM
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They imported all of Sunday and up to 0500 today. That is normal to conserve perched water. They have not exported because I think they are in drought.
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Would it be reasonable to build special diesels with heavy flywheels for grid back-up? ~1979 I had a Lister diesel running a house high in the Welsh hills. It’s flywheel was huge and took me well over a minute to manually crank up to operating speed. I’d then drop the valve lifter and the big single would thump to life and chug along all night. Turning any item on or off never caused the engine to falter but we never ran motors bigger than the washing machine.
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Synchronous condensers do not need a fuel supply. They spin up under the system power and their speed is maintained by the system power. They also have the ability to be over-excited to provide reactive power.
Broken Hill mines had 40Hz power so when the 50Hz supply was connected at was converted tio 40Hz power through static means. Broken hill also had a static reactive power source for voltage control that probably still exists. Its function would now be better served with a synchronous condenser that could also provide grid inertia needed for frequency control. It has been almost 30 years since I was involved with anything at Broken Hill.
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RickWill. Thanks for mentioning the Synchronous condensers. Looking them up I found a description that possibly oversimplifies things to it being a spinning generator with no mechanical input. The only control being via the DC excited field magnetism. When i have time i might look further into them but it seems very much like making a 50Hz AC device behave like a what a capacitance does to DC that can also for a short time shift its own voltage. The obvious problem with it being the same as a battery or a flywheel. The chicken and the egg thing. That is that it needs the system to be stable to get up to speed before it can stabilise the system a little. If the excitation is then increased or decreased this change needs to be made up for eventually.
As you say “They spin up under the system power and their speed is maintained by the system power.” They may only delay a problem until something else kicks in to solve it. At that point they may eventually gently add to that problem that the something else needs to have solved.
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The other query is what quality transmissions towers are they building these days? We’ve had transmission towers ( extremely large ones) in place in Australia for probably at least 60 years. None of them seem to fall over in storms. But the towers built recently, maybe in the last 30 years, appear to be substandard.
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The towers to supply Broken Hill were paid for by the mines of the day. They were not gold plated. They outlasted the mines they were built for.
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Are there other similar towers in the area?
Time to replace them all. Seems the towers were problem #1.
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Recycled steel star pickets are high carbon and horses push them over and they break if you try and bend them back. 30 year old FHP real star pickets go for ever and can be warmed with a gas torch and straightened in a vice with a heavy hammer. Perhaps the pylon company used brittle steel from China ?
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How good are your sources?
When South Australia had the big blackout we were shown photos of downed towers with their concrete mounting plugs, something like 50 cm x 6 metres, wholly extracted. This suggests that the designers did not give due consideration to the nature of the soil in a wet time.
But they didn’t say if those photos were of this job or from stock.
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A thought to consider, when Labor PM Gillard referred to “gold plated poles and wires” she was responding to advice that the wind and solar installations all had connecting transmission lines to the main grid, and that effectively consumers were paying for them via electricity bills despite private sector ownership.
At that time it was also mentioned that to encourage the private sector investors state governments had allowed them to build transmission towers to a minimum standard that was not what had been required in the past.
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I am trying to remember the details of that gold plated call. It was a cop out, and she wasn’t the only one that made it. The gold plating may have been np more than reliable power.
The story went all the way back to one February in the early 1980s and an “oil shock”. The OPEC(?) countries declared the price of oil to be too low and throttled the trade, causing the price to rise. This caused panic around the world, but the NSW government saw it as an opportunity to become a major supplier of coal fired energy.
So in that fateful February they placed an order with Toshiba for six new 660mw generators, when they already had six such generators under construction at from memory Eraring and Vale’s Point. These new generators were for Bayswater and Mt Piper, but they were not needed for years as the oil shock fizzled out when the locals started digging up oil in the North Sea, which broke the Middle East’s hold on the market.
Contracts had already been let for Bayswater, so construction went ahead. Mt Piper was not built for another decade. This was the beginning of the gold plating, but it finished up serving us very well, with cheap, reliable power.
But I think Julia Gillard was referring to the “poles and wires”, which were badly neglected from about the turn ogf the century as everybody wondered where CAGW was going to take us. Eventually that neglect led to unreliability, which in its turn brought increased activity in servicing the distributing infrastruvture.
This is where the gold plating that I remember came in, as governments brought in new OH&S regulations which required so much expenditure on upgrading plant that the service providers instead of upgrading their fleets sold the lot and replaced it with new plant.
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I doubt you could substantiate those assertions Ross.
Towers are metal and metal corrodes. ALL owners of poles and wires have large linesman gangs doing maintenance and $s can only be spent once and maintenance of “traditional stuff” suffers.
Fifty years ago I was working for the then Northern Electricity Authority as part of the project to duplicate the 135kV coastal line from Gladstone to Moranbah with an inland 275kV line specifically to harden the line against cyclones. Premier Joh knew, even then, that a state couldn’t develop without reliable power and he wanted the Bowen Basin coal mines diggin’ and his Qld Rail haulin’ that coal for export. I was building and maintaining the radio coms so had a lot of contact with the linies and even then they were complaining that they couldn’t do the scheduled inspection/maintenance.
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Say after me: “the only way people wake up is the hard way”.
Yes, bring it on to capital cities, let the great green energy lie wakeup begin.
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Except, as always, we have to lay the groundwork so voters understand why it failed (before it happens).
Otherwise, every crisis is a tool for communist encroachment: “We need another agency!” “We need more regulation!”
Sitting back and waiting for a collapse is not the answer.
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Jo, that is a valid point that I have not considered up to now. Almost everybody on this site would be able to understand very quickly why a widespread power outage occurred once we knew what part/s of the grid had become dysfunctional. However, the majority of the public would believe what they were told and that the answer, probably, would be more wind and solar.
So yes, we do need to educate. Commentators like Nick Cater do a fine job in The Australian but we need to get to a wider audience. It may be that many in the public, despite being unschooled in the problems approaching, are still wary of so called renewables and would be susceptible to being educated with a little effort.
Luckily, Sky News is country wide and free outside the cities, and it is doing a good job too on this issue.
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Ruinables need a nuclear/coal/gas powered grid to be able to operate.
Battery vehicles are charged from the Grid.
Hydrocarbons are the energy storage molecule of life.
Carbon Dioxide is essential for life.
All energy is intrinsically nuclear energy.
Sun worship is prescient- all thank the giant hydrogen fusion reactor.
my 6c worth
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FWIW – and elsewhere
“Cuba Remains Paralyzed by Energy Crisis, Despite Partial Restoration of Electrical Grid”
https://hotair.com/headlines/2024/10/27/cuba-remains-paralyzed-by-energy-crisis-despite-partial-restoration-of-electrical-grid-n3796351
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The preppers were right … 😁
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In my view, everyone should be prepared for grid outages.
It appears most people have little understanding of electric power supply beyond a wall socket. You plug in a lead, activate the switch and the electrical device just does what it is meant to do.
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Most people do not agree with you.
Talk to a young person and their eyes start rolling back … if you so much as suggest an extra carton of long life milk and a spare box of muesli bars.
Then start mentioning that some days perhaps the EFTPOS cards might stop working … you get denial and often outright rage.
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Even the UK energy networks are saying that now!
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/prepare-for-blackouts-say-energy-networks/
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And holding the UK’s hand of cards in Energy Blackout Poker is Mr. Miliband.
Not sure, but I think he may actually be .. worse .. than your Bowen.
Auto, still buying candles, etc.!
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My power station operator son says rolling 4hr outages are already planned for NSW.
00
Now we know how Broken Hill got broken, by whom and the name of their operation: Albo and Bobo with their Make Australia A Renewable Energy Superpower.
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Following the runaway success of renewables, Albo has decided to enter the space race.
https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_sm0ttfwtRv1z23obp.mp4
Pretty much. 😆
Give Albo the elbow.
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FWIW
“Russia’s Landmark BRICS Summit And The Specter Of De-Dollarization”
“Held from Oct. 22 to 24 in the Russian city of Kazan, the event focused largely on “de-dollarization”—the idea of phasing out the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency and preferred medium of global exchange.
“We do not reject … the dollar,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the summit. “But if we are prevented from working with it, what do we have to do? We have to search for alternatives. And this is what is happening.””
More at
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russias-landmark-brics-summit-and-specter-de-dollarization
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Sounds like many places in Australia could do with a live sheep import industry. Brings home the meaning of closing the export trade to nations that have few refrigerators.
Sorry. I forgot. This Federal government and the State governments are slow learners. They see nothing. Hear nothing. But say heaps of misinformation on anything to do with anthropogenic global warming and their remedies for an event they can’t control anyway. Face it; Lomberg has been telling them that the only economical way of coping with our climate environments is to adapt. Already costing $billions and said to hit the $1T mark in costs, these governments are already closing businesses by the useless costs they impose on businesses and the people. There is a total incapacity for these governments to learn anything. Their ideologies are set in stone. If they were to be subject to their new censorship laws they would Pinocchio and always be confronting the courts for deception and misinformation built by their huge media disinformation bureaucrats.
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“… two brand new useful diesel generators for every remote town in Australia”
A good idea not considered because – wait for it —
CO2!
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How about MMR?
Mini Modular Reactor – nuclear.
See submissions to the Senate Inquiry from SMR Technologies Australia.
https://www.smrnuclear.com.au/_files/ugd/c733f6_459f57dfb13945e3ae2f0217cd04f276.pdf
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I was in a meeting of power industry bods back in 2009 at which the strong consensus around the room was that the recently geed up solar initiative from the Labor government would become a real problem for the grid. I don’t reckon anyone there thought we’d get as far as this tho.
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I have an old friend who has been into just about every coal generator in Australia. We still chuckle about the transition when we meet for the occasional lunch. But he also has solar panels on his roof and is thinking about a battery. We just wonder how long it will be before the clowns like Blackout realise where it is all headed.
Broken Hill is but a very small example. I doubt much will change until there is a major grid outage where people die. Texas was not bad enough to sound the alarm bells.
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“Renewables DON’T WORK”…Why isn’t this the headline on the front pages of the msm? Goodluck NSW when Eraring power station closes after the next NSW state election. By a petrol generator and get it hooked up to the mains box, because you’re going to need it.🤣🤣🤣
Australia..the dumb and dumber country
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Yes I am going to get a generator soon. Ive been waiting for when to pull the trigger for a while now, but I’m still waiting for the next fed election to see what happens.
I own three diesel engines; a car, a tractor and an excavator. Bugs me to have to buy another.
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Have you looked at tractor PTO driven generators? As you’ve already got the engine you’ll get more kW’s for your money.
50
Any remote farmer will tell you how solar works in supplying an islanded remote homestead. You start with enough batteries to cover your baseload for the day. You hook up a solar system to charge your batteries. You draw power ONLY from batteries through an inverter to supply 240V AC. If you put a load…like a toaster, an iron or a welder or an air conditioner ANY load above what ever is running at the time…The generator kicks in.
Broken Hill just suffered the same stuff up as Alice Springs. Northern Territory RIGHTLY now demands that intermittent generating assets must predict 30 minutes into the future how much energy they intend to inject into the grid. A black start requires only RESISTIVE loads for the generation to increase against this RESISTIVE load. A resistive load is a toaster or an iron or an old jug or an old brush commutator electric motor. Induction loads or not good for firing up a HVAC system.
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Very interesting. But it reminds me why I hate electrics so much. I get so confused with all those terms. If I can’t see it, I don’t get it.
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We need an electrical engineer to do a post about INDUCTIVE and RESISTIVE loads.
I notice that when I feed my 3.5kW genny into my meter-board and try running many loads (~3kW), I have a problem when a fridge kicks-in. I’m guessing this is a reactive load issue.(?)
Your islanded farm grid sounds like a model for normal grid homes to copy. You could charge from wind, solar, generator or off-peak if you have it. If the grid failed you would already be running on your own micro-grid. In effect the grid would simply top up your battery during the odd time when your own system was not up to supplying your total requirements.
The advantage to the grid would be that the home battery is absorbing all the reactive load issues. From the grid’s perspective the home would look like one steady smooth load. No phase ripples or odd signals bouncing back up the line.
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That’s the short term start up surge, which can be 5-10x the normal running current, and may only last a split second. It applies to any rotating machine (the inertia which normally stabilises the grid), but especially to a compressor like your fridge, which usually has some back pressure to overcome. You would still get this surge on a DC motor driven appliance, but the battery would normally cover the spike.
30
Inductive loads are generally motors and transformers, devices with magnetic fields. They cause the current to lag behind the voltage. also known as inductive reactance. Reactive power supplies them.
A decent explainer: https://electricityforum.com/reactive-power
When you energize a motor / inductive load, there is an instantaneous surge of power required to initiate rotation. Usually it is 4 to 6 times the running load requirements. That’s why your genny acts up. It is being asked to instantly provide a massive surge, albeit only for a second or so. The angle between the apparent power vector and the active power vector is not zero, but can be upwards of 36 degrees.
Resistive loads have the current and voltage “in phase” and do not require reactive power. They consume only active or true power. the angle between the apparent power vector and the active power vector is zero degrees.
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Thanks for that link. 🤠
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At a Museum where I assist with technical issues, a problem exists when the entire Museum is powered up every morning by releasing the emergency stop switch. (Not a good idea I know.) As Lance says, the inductive loads, plus the many switching regulator startups (not all of them are fitted with slow start), often cause the circuit breakers to trip. I’m trying to lessen this impact by fitting delayed-start timers to some GPOs and this does improve the situation.
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Graeme4:
Any large inductive loads, AirCons/Large motors, etc, ought to have a time delay relay placed into their startup sequence, and then randomized, ie not all set to the same time delay.
An aspect of supply charges is “Demand Charge”, in which the maximum power demand is charged for 15 minutes, regardless of its duration. So, a 1 MW demand for 0ne second is fully charged as if it were 15 minutes.
Best to spread out any large load startups. A 1000 ton water chiller costs some AUD 750 to start up. If you add up the AC/fan/motor/pump loads in that museum, you might find your demand charges are some 25% of your total costs for electricity.
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Good to see LNP has dumped the Pioneer Burdekin pumped hydro scheme priced at up to $24B.
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I hadn’t heard that, but hope you are right.
I always goto GEarth to get the lay of the land on projects like this and the decline for the pipes would be something like 1:6. Round trip losses for that would be ruinous. The high, theoretical figures oft quoted are for near vertical pipes.
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Broken Hill, broken power assets, it’s hard to believe this is in Australia.
Please, why couldn’t this have happened to Canberra.
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And yet “Blackout” Chris Bowen plans to build a further 28,000km of flimsy, storm prone transmission lines in a futile attempt to find enough wind blowing somewhere in the Australian continent at night. Broken Hill is a little taste of the future with the nuclear deniers in charge. Get out of the way Luddites!
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Further to my post…A generator must SEE the load for it to make electricity. Cold start against inductive loads incur upwards of ten times the load at start up.
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Not only inductive loads. Switching regulators fitted to many items these days can have high initial inductive effects on startup, and unfortunately not all are fitted with NTC thermistors to limit this starting current.
20
To counter the echo box try reading up on the Isle of Eigg (Scotland) and its community owned and operated renewables grid.
http://isleofeigg.org/eigg-electric/
It is mostly hydro with 4 wind turbines and ~150kW of solar which is rather poorly sited. The 24hr back-up battery acts like one giant capacitor to smooth out all the fluctuating inputs but they do have a diesel auto-start generator for long dark, windless winter nights.
My initial interest came from Skeleton Tech’s innovative use of graphene super capacitor banks to smooth the output of the four 6kW wind turbines. I reckon capacitors are going to become a significant part of the renewables situation. I start my 3 litre diesel car using Maxwell aluminium foil super caps and reckon the little battery will now last at least twice as long.
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Lithium battery fires would be minor compared to a large super capacitor failing. Wouldn’t want to be anywhere near one when that happens. Supercaps are fine for short-duration low power backups, but I wouldn’t be using them for any large-scale backup system.
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Yes, TV caps go off with a bang when over-loaded but the ones in my car have comprehensive management circuitry. They came out of a diesel/electric train and still test okay. We do not hear of trains catching alight. Never-the-less it might be wise to instal a dry powder CO2 fire extinguisher in my vehicle. Thanks for the advice.
00
My understanding is that off-grid renewables are responsibly installed with fossil-fuel back up. So the failure of back up reflects on an ineffective supply provider.
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KISS
Keep it simple, stupid.
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I presume the riot started when cold tins of beer ran out?
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Sky News are now reporting that Power returns to Broken Hill after 10 days. So, what’s the problem?/sarc
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LOL! The farce grows everyday. Despite the obvious impact on the Broken Hill community, the “incident” must be providing great entertainment to the war and economic planners of other countries. Who knew bringing the Australian economy to a screeching halt was as simple as bringing down a few well chosen high voltage transmission lines around the country?
(Well, many on here did, but this “incident” just lays it bare for the Green tinged defense planners and psychotic politicians who will continue to ignore the obvious lesson in rural NSW.)
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Could have built a 500Mw coal fired power plant and bought coal
to last for many years while employing Australian workers.
Or just kept using the existing plants in Victoria instead
of closing them, and upgraded transmission lines.
Reliable, cheap power for a century.
Australia’s states should secede and leave the ACT
and the parasite politicians and bureaucrats to starve
in the dark. They’ve been deceiving and betraying
Australians for decades.
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https://www.inqld.com.au/opinion/politics-opinion/2024/06/13/small-target-big-deal-lnp-leader-pledges-to-scrap-contentious-hydro-scheme
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Looking at the issue from a slightly different perspective I see that most people expect someone else to supply power and water to their home/business premise. The more we trust others to supply critical services the more prone we become to catastrophic failures. If we mistrusted everyone we’d take precautions.
Items to consider.
1). A rain-water tank with filters.
2). A generator with a few days worth of fuel. My catering fridge and a freezer contain nearly as much dollar value of food as a small generator’s price.
3). A comprehensive First Aid Kit? Last week I came across a wealthy retired woman who had little idea about how to clean and bandage a simple wound.
4). Who has spare LPG bottles for cooking during a power outage?
5). How many days of food does your home stock?
6). A battery radio to receive local radio station advice.
7). An 18 volt torch with a week of battery-life.
8) A mobile phone back-up battery. I have one from Amazon that runs my phone for a week or you can get an adaptor for a Makita 18 V tool battery which has a USB port.
9). A camping fridge and fold out solar PV array. I now run my ARB fridge 24/7 as a drinks fridge and it is really useful during power outages. It runs on one deep cycle battery and an old solar panel that I was given.
The ideas of self reliance and diversification are generally not part of our culture.
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Didn’t see this mentioned on the BBC Website.
Colour me utterly astounded!
Auto – er, /s if Auntie Beeb happens to read this.
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