Powerless: Wind & Solar Transition Leaves 500,000 Boiling In The Dark
Having trashed the cheapest and most reliable power supply in the world, the Australian (failed) State of Victoria simply can’t keep the lights on.
Hundreds of thousands of families were left boiling in the dark last week, and it took days to restore power across the People’s Republic. Melbourne Airport was left without power for hours (see above).
Victoria came to international attention during the Covid-19 pandemic panic, with the most Draconian and authoritarian measures against its population outside the PRC. In fact, its CCP inspired Premier, Dan Andrews followed Communist China’s punitive lockdown measures with glee.
Likewise, Victoria’s energy policy (and we use that term loosely) is something driven by neo-Marxist ideologues, rather than engineers and energy market economists.
What’s left is a dog’s breakfast, where Victorian taxpayers are forking out tens of $millions to the remaining coal-fired power plant operators to keep those plants ticking along, as best they can. The plants are being run not as base-load plants running smoothly around the clock, but rather as “peakers”, being rapidly ramped up and down to accommodate total and totally unpredictable collapses in wind power output and total and perfectly predictable collapses in solar power output (ie sunset).
The usual propaganda outlets began pointing the finger at ‘unreliable’, ‘ageing’ coal-fired power plants (ignoring the facts above, and the consequence of not allowing coal-fired plants to operate profitably – the massive subsidies to wind and solar put paid to that potential, long ago).
What the wind and sun cult couldn’t point to was the moment when – following the outage at one of those coal-fired power plants – wind and solar generators instantly ramped up their output to accommodate that outage. Yeh, we know, it’s a nonsense: wind and solar output, is what it is and can never respond to increases in demand; it’s always and everywhere about wind speed and the unimpeded angle of the Sun.
We pick up commentary from Sky News (an interview with Nationals MP Keith Pitt), and analysis from the team at Jo Nova and commentary from Eric Worrall. The broad message of which is that if you let lunatics loose with your energy supply, you can expect no end of chaos.
Loy Yang A power outage a ‘glimpse of the future’ without coal
Sky News
Peta Credlin and Keith Pitt
13 February 2024
Nationals MP Keith Pitt says a major outage at Victoria’s biggest power station Loy Yang A represents a “glimpse of the future for Victoria” without coal-fired power.
Approximately 500,000 households especially on the surf coast west of Geelong and in the inner west of the state have suffered power blackouts.
Powerlines in Anakie, just north of Geelong, tripped and may have caused Loy Yang A and the four units in AGL’s facility to go offline.
AGL is currently investigating the cause, and the units had been down since 2:15pm AEST, but would be providing hourly updates.
“That is a big power station and that is a big outage and it’s a big blackout,” Mr Pitt told Sky News host Peta Credlin.
“Welcome to a glimpse of the future for Victoria – if you want to know what it looks like without coal-fired power – this is it.”
Transcript
Peta Credlin: Let’s go now back to that power outage in Victoria. 500,000 households. You heard from Simon Love there before, issues with six metropolitan rail lines in Victoria. Of course they’re electric. And then chaos at intersections. I’m told, all the way down to Mornington Peninsula from the Melbourne CBD, you’ve got lights out and police trying to direct traffic. I’m joined now by LNP MP, former resources minister though, and a bit of an electrical brain, Keith Pitt.
I know I only had you on the show last night, Keith, but I tell you, this is huge in Victoria. And I reckon for the last 6-12 months, you and I have been talking about all the expert analysis out there saying the Victorian grid is inherently unstable. The warnings have been there for a long time. We know earlier today when we had that outage around two o’clock there was demand shedding. So in layman’s terms, that’s telling industry to shut down their engines and send their workers home. I don’t suspect you’re surprised by these events today, given this foreseeability.
Keith Pitt: Peta Credlin, welcome to a glimpse of the future for Victoria. If you want to know what it looks like without coal-fired power, this is it. Now, there’s a lot of cascading events that happened, and for all the viewers that have got a technical knowledge, please don’t send me emails complaining about the way I describe this. But think about it just like the power supply in your house, every single electrical asset is protected against overload and against short circuit. When the transmission lines fall over, you get a short circuit. It looks to protect the network by turning them off. All the things that were drawing electricity at that point in time, then go to anywhere else that can find that power. And that tends to be the generators that are connected to the network. And the network cascades back on its protection system until it finds some point to stop. And in this case, it looks likely that that was Loy Yang A, and all of those units have tripped, 2000 megawatts. Now, that is a big power station, and that is a big outage and it’s a big blackout.
Peta Credlin: I’ll put that table back on the screen so people can see it at home. This was a spot price today, it just skyrocketed. So when people in your state of Queensland were paying about 60 bucks a megawatt hour for power, in Victoria, they were paying $16,600 for that same megawatt of power. That’s the problem.
Keith Pitt: And right now, Peta, 500,000 of them are paying nothing because they’re not connected. And this is the challenge when the network is so unstable and so reliant on intermittent wind and solar, for example. I mean, the idea that we are going to have the nation and our economy rely on the weather, and you’ve got extreme weather conditions in Victoria right now. Imagine if that damage was hailstorms right throughout a couple of thousand megawatts of solar panels, which you’ve got in Victoria, that you simply can’t replace in a short period of time. Then you’ve got nothing, there’s nothing left.
And now, they’ll get Loy Yang back online depending on how long it takes, if boilers have cooled down, for example. If they’ve got auxiliary power, if they’ve got all those other things that they can get up and running and get them on quickly, you’ll get your lights back on. But the last report I saw, there’s over 400 faults, lightning strikes and everything else. And it’s the people of Victoria that miss out and it’s industry who aren’t producing anything, and their ability to pay their wages and be part of the economy is lost.
Peta Credlin: I might add too, in the west of the state, we’ve got some pretty significant fires in around Halls Gap and the Wimmera area. And of course, as we know nowadays, you don’t have a landline, you don’t have that bit of copper to your home in case of emergency. You’ve got a mobile or you’ve got a VoIP phone, a computer-based phone, and so when you haven’t got power, you’re also pretty vulnerable.
Keith Pitt: Back in the old days, Peta, under Telecom for example, they used to guarantee about a 48-hour supply with battery backup, because it was a centralised exchange. You’ve now got towers everywhere, and they do have some backup, but they tend to be a lot more short-term unless you get diesel generators to them to make them work. So people not only lose their power, they lose their communications and their ability to call emergency services, for example. And your point about fires is exactly right, and Chris Bowen wants you to have more transmission lines which are more risk and less reliability and even more chance that you’ll lose and have blackouts, lose your electricity supply over a longer period of time. This is why these proposals are so fraught with danger. They’re incredibly expensive and we are seeing the reality of it right now.
Peta Credlin: Well, Australians have got a chance to do something about it before it gets much worse. Keith Pitt, I appreciate you dropping everything to jump on tonight. I think this is a really big issue and I appreciate your expert analysis. Thank you, as always.
Sky News
Blackouts for 500,000: Time to talk about the transition to expensive, fragile, ugly, collapsing transmission lines?
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
14 February 2024
Just how wise is it to have a grid dependent on all this fragile infrastructure?
Nature seems to be telling us something about adding another 10,000 kilometers of vulnerable transmission lines.
Yesterday six high voltage transmission lines collapsed in Victoria leaving half a million people without electricity for hours. But only a few weeks ago five towers collapsed in Western Australia putting 30,000 in the dark. And out in Kalgoorlie, when the gas backup plants failed, thousands of people went for days without power in 40 degree heat. Some people were unable to call triple zero, freezers full of food were spoilt and nearly everything left to buy had to be paid for in cash.
In Victoria the towers fell at 1:10pm during a storm. Their loss triggered the shut down of 4 large coal power units at Loy B Yang taking out 2 GW of generation. It took three hours to get one turbine back on line, and eight hours to restore the second. Everyone is talking about “the coal fired outage” but about half the wind power running at the time was also lost, and over the next hour, more than half the grid scale solar power also disappeared.
It was a shock to the system for a state with nearly 7 million people:
Graph from Anero.id Enery (Feb 13)
The sudden simultaneous drops for wind power and coal power suggests they were both affected by the transmission line failures. Brown coal generation fell almost instantly from 4GW to 2GW, but wind power in the state fell from 1.8GW to 1GW sharply.
Graph from Anero.id Enery (Feb 13)
Solar and wind power just made the storm damage worse:
The renewable cheer squad is calling for “a faster transition” to somehow solve these blackouts but both solar and wind power need thousands of miles of the very same collapsible transmission lines, putting the grid at even more risk of sudden breaks.
Indeed wind power fell right when we needed it. We can’t confirm yet how much of that was due to the towers collapsing, or whether it was because plants were shutting off in turbulent conditions.
Grid scale solar certainly didn’t save the day even though it was the middle of the day. Perhaps the solar plants were cut off, or perhaps the clouds rolled over? Solar “farm” production was reduced from 500MW to 200MW through most of the afternoon. And while rooftop solar suffered smaller losses, by 2pm it lost about 1 GW of generation too. About the nicest thing we can say about solar power is that it won’t destabilize the grid if storms arrive at night.
The things that did save the day were gas and hydro power (see below), but if Hazelwood coal power was still running, it would have helped too. Luckily, there is no drought on the East Coast at the moment. In a normal El Nino year, the hydro might not have been there…
Graph from Anero.id Enery
The Victorian Energy Minister blames the weather and doesn’t seem to realize some forms of generation need a thousand more miles of power lines:
But Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said that if “catastrophic extreme weather” physically took out power lines, “then no matter what you do in terms of electricity generation or other technologies, that will cause outages”.
But if all of the state ran on coal fired power or gas, less of the state would have blacked out.
Grids with lots of transmission lines are vulnerable grids
The Guardian, masters of misinformation, told us that the coal fired plants were affected by the storms, just in case you thought they might be stronger than flimsy windmills and giant sheets of glass panels.
The Guardian didn’t mention the 2GW drop in wind power and solar output. They happen every day of course…
Further information is available from WattClarity — like grid inertia, and the frequency volatility.
Jo Nova Blog
Professor Dargaville: We Need More Grid Scale Batteries to Combat Supply Outages
Watts Up With That?
Eric Worrall
14 February 2024
Wild weather has pushed the Aussie State of Victoria’s fragile grid beyond breaking point during the last few days. The last thing Victoria needs is senior academics pushing non-solutions.
A major blackout left 500,000 Victorian homes without power – but it shows our energy system is resilient
Published: February 14, 2024 8.10am AEDT
Roger Dargaville
Director Monash Energy Institute, Monash University
Half a million homes and businesses in Victoria were left without power late on Tuesday following a major power outage. The disruption occurred when severe winds knocked over several high-voltage electricity transmission towers, causing all four units of the Loy Yang A coal-fired power station to trip and go offline.
Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio described the blackout as “one of the largest outage events in the state’s history”.
The event has prompted questions about the reliability of the state’s electricity grid. But it’s important to note these extreme winds would have seriously disrupted any power system. It has little to do with the mix of renewable energy and conventional fossil fuels.
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According to a statement from AEMO, the storm also damaged hundreds of powerlines and power poles and restoring electricity to all customers “may take days if not weeks”
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Battery storage may have helped steady the grid. Batteries have ultra-rapid responses to these kinds of disuptions and can add or subtract power from the grid within milliseconds to keep the grid stable.
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The immense vulnerability of Australia’s industrial heartland to the severing of a single connection to a distant coal plant is a disgrace.
I don’t know why Professor Dargaville suggested batteries might solve the problem. Batteries could have stabilised the grid – for a few minutes. The suggestion any remotely affordable level of battery capacity could have maintained grid supply in the face of major and prolonged transmission outages is absurd.
More powerlines might have improved the odds of electricity getting to where it is needed – but more powerlines would also have been damaged by the storm. At best this would be a very expensive solution to energy resilience.
A distributed network of modular nuclear power plants could have eliminated the risk of a single point of failure bringing down the system, and could have reduced or even eliminated widespread blackouts.
If a network of modular nuclear plants was established inside Melbourne, Melbourne would not have suffered a major outage after the connection to a distant coal plant was severed.
But nobody is implementing sensible energy solutions in today’s Australia. Australia’s climate obsessed politicians only permit uselessly unreliable green energy solutions which don’t actually solve anyone’s energy problems.
Watts Up With That?
ajmarciniak 