Another widespread power outage in SA

[crawf]

That's not how it's being viewed interstate... by anyone.

Disagree. I've looked at social media all day today and seen huge support for Weatherill from people interstate.

Like or loath him, I thought Jay Weatherill was brilliant today. About time someone called up Frydenberg.

[bits]

SA holds its hand out as much as any state for funding.

not true it gets far more per head of population in federal funding and defence contracts.

It has more land than any other state given to defense, there should be more spent here.

SA gets a bigger take of GST than some other states but that is because of a formula all states agreed to.

/you just contradicted your last point.

Nope, that isn't SA with a hand out that is an agreed formula that currently calculates SA is owed more money.
If SA wasn't paid it in full it would be the other states taking money from SA.

Reminder not once has SA lost power because of lack of capacity to generate power.

If SA was able to generate enough of its own power at the time of the last blackout, it would not have been sucking merrily on the Vic interconnector. There was virtually NO wind power being generated on that hot afternoon.

1)While Pelican Point was not at capacity and many numerous other power stations were not running at that time. If all SA based power stations were going I believe the interconnectors could have been disconnected.
2)The Vic interconnects are used as power generating/supplying source for SA. Due to market pressures the interconnectors has now replaced Port Augusta and most of Pelican Point. That was a bad outcome as it replaced good sources with crappy ones. The interconnectors were introduced and have been used so far as if they were as good as a local source but they are not.

Why would we not be sucking power from Victoria? The NEM dictates that Victoria is likely a major source of power for SA on any given day.

We did not need wind power, the power generation capacity for the state was perfectly ok to handle the demand with no wind power.
It was not the lack of wind power that caused the outage, it was AEMO did not turn on gas power stations.

Not once has lack of wind or lack of sun caused an outage for SA. It has been mismanagement by AEMO, preference to import power over dodgy leads from Victoria and severe network damage.

The so called "intermittent power" has NEVER failed us.

Apparently the Nsw and Vic states require federal funding for their base load power but SA does not?

SA has built wind farms with federal money.

Wind farms are not base load. The Federal Government could build SA base load capacity, they are happy to do that for NSW and Vic apparently and then moan that SA does not have enough base load.

Closing Port Augusta, adding wind farms and solar panels has not yet lead to a state which lacks the capacity to generate enough power.

Lack of thermal baseload power is causing the intermittent shortages, so yes, closing Port Augusta has contributed to the problem.

None of the outages has been caused by lack of having base load or peaking generators. It has been mismanagement by AEMO, preference to import power over dodgy leads from Victoria and severe network damage.
None of these outages have been because SA exceeded a generation capacity wall.
We have the capacity, it either failed(interconnectors and storms) or was never turned on (Pelican Point and others).

The interconnectors suck and the NEM is broken

Agree the NEM is broken, but the interconnections are what keeps the lights on at present. They are about to become irrelevant once the Victorian thermal generators close.

Nope, the interconnectors are not required, we chose to use them instead of using the existing local generators. We covered this about 10 pages ago. We have enough generation capacity, we do not need power from Victoria to keep the lights on, we chose to use power from Victoria.

The interconnectors are used on many days when SA could power the entire state between Torrens Island and Pelican Point alone.
We have huge coal base load generators which work about 95% of the time.
They are offered and used by NEM/AEMO as if they are equal to a local generator, that prevents competition for new reliable base load to be built in SA by the private industry.
This is why the NEM is broken, it does not care how reliable a source is.

The interconnectors will not become irrelevant when Vic turns off 1 of their coal stations, if that is what you are hinting at.
Victoria will still operate their other 2 massive coal stations. Hazelwood represents 30% of Victorias coal power stations. Victoria also has very large gas power stations and many smaller plus interconnects to NSW also.

NSW actually suffered from the problem people incorrectly think SA has, not enough generators.

probably yes, because like the rest of Australia, state governments have not bee constructing enough thermal power stations, despite a doubling of population in the last 40 years.

A little bit of that and a bit of States have not replaced aging power stations. They created a national market which was supposed to lead to the private industry building stations, but they didn't.
The States have no income from electricity anymore to pay for building power stations. It was all sold off to the private sector.
The NEM is stupid and broken.

The actual usage is fairly flat these days, each house uses less power per year and it averages out with growth.
Each states peak power usage hasn't increased since about the year 2000.

Remove the interconnectors and magically all the previous generators will be on.

Except the ones closed and decommissioned, due to the "free" power in the system during optimal wind generation .

Cheap base load from Victoria is as much to blame as wind.
The only significant power station to be decommissioned was Port Augusta. Port Augusta was running out of coal and was due for retirement. Lots of factors come in to play.

Not 1 acknowledgement that renewable generation has created instability, which ironically even jay has acknowledged because his solution to the current issue is not more wind farms, but THERMAL gas generation.

They have created no stability issue, no outage has been caused by lack of wind power, they have been caused by damage to the network or gas stations not turned on.

The plan is not to fix some invented issue with wind power, it is to fix the problems with the NEM and interconnectors. Wind farms are not base load like the interconnectors are being used as.
Wind farms can not replace the base load the interconnectors are currently feeding to SA. Of course Jay's plan is to replace it with local Thermal base load.

[JAKJ]

It's disappointing though how much of Turnbull & co's misinformation around SA's energy transition is allowed to go unchallenged in the media. They're barefaced liars on the matter.As churlish as Weatherill's gatecrash might come across, they needed to be called out and in some ways I wish he'd been even more scathing.

Agreed, but they know the fuck-up lies at the feet of Tony Abbot and the scrapping of the carbon tax. Regardless of your views on climate change, creating that kind of long-term investment uncertainty for an industry who builds hugely expensive assets with 25+ year payback periods was always going to end in failure. Hence you have an almost uniform position across industry groups of wanting to price carbon.

Once storage and (hopefully) demand-response pricing and incentivisation becomes more common place over the next few years I think you'll find the cost of power in SA drop significantly as the marginal cost of generation and storage drops towards zero.

Investors also love renewables as you have more certainty on your return given you are not beholden to wildly fluctuating ongiong costs (as we have seen in the gas gen space in particular).

For a State/ city that is struggling to grow private business and attract talent there is also a huge benefit to being on the bleeding edge of what will be a trillion + dollar global industry, I personally know of/ have been involved with one startup that has done very well from the aggressive move towards renewables and now operate internationally (with Adl headquarters) based on the skills/ knowledge developed here.

[skyliner]

And does anyone know how Arrium steelworks have fared out of this? Roxby Downs?? Effect on future heavy industry possibilities??? Does anyone know why there was no battery backup storage for the wind power generators (or do I have this wrong)? IMHO baseload needs addressing.

[Goodsy]

And does anyone know how Arrium steelworks have fared out of this? Roxby Downs?? Effect on future heavy industry possibilities??? Does anyone know why there was no battery backup storage for the wind power generators (or do I have this wrong)? IMHO baseload needs addressing.

IIRC the Steelworks has its own generators

[monotonehell]

...Does anyone know why there was no battery backup storage for the wind power generators (or do I have this wrong)? IMHO baseload needs addressing.

Because:
a> Successive governments (state or federal) never built any to sell off to foreign private concerns.
b> Successive governments (state or federal) never incentivised private industry to build storage.
c> Private industry never built any.
d> Market failure.
e> All of the above.

Basically no one had their eye on the holistic picture. Experts have been warning about the need for storage for a while now. Before Tesla, RedPower and the other SA one whose name escapes me batteries weren't a viable option so pumped hydro was the only technology that looked like a goer. Molten salt and flywheels have been mooted in the past, but they both haven't been proven in practice.

[bits]

Battery storage still isn't an option.
100mw of storage is tiny, but considered insanely huge for battery storage.
A 100mw power station is tiny and that creates 100mw every hour, 24 hours a day, not just 100mw for one shot for 1 hour.

100mw storage will do close to nothing. 200mw storage would do close to nothing. Get to 400-600mw and you are just starting to talk about something that could consistently assist.

Pumped hydro is a way to actually store energy, batteries currently are not.

[Goodsy]

Battery storage still isn't an option.
100mw of storage is tiny, but considered insanely huge for battery storage.
A 100mw power station is tiny and that creates 100mw every hour, 24 hours a day, not just 100mw for one shot for 1 hour.

100mw storage will do close to nothing. 200mw storage would do close to nothing. Get to 400-600mw and you are just starting to talk about something that could consistently assist.

Pumped hydro is a way to actually store energy, batteries currently are not.

100mw is roughly equal to the load shedding that recently occurred

[bits]

Yes I assume that is where this magical 100mw is being pulled from to be "a fix for SA".
But that is one outage.
Nsw would have needed 600mw to get just make it through their last load shedding.

But these are one off exact events.

Previously when the interconnectors have tripped the load shedding has been much larger than 100mw.
When the wind is blowing we might have 800-1200mw per hour. If the wind was to suddenly stop blowing as it constantly blamed as a real problem, what would 100mw for 1 hour really do?

[monotonehell]

Point One
Capitals matter. 100mW is one hundred milliwatts. I think you guys mean 100MW - megawatts.

Point Two
Battery storage should be small, many and distributed about the grid. Not all in one place. This is to alleviate the single point of failure problem. I'm assuming that the single battery installation from Jay's baby is intended as a pilot plant.

Similar to renewable generation. Lots of small units, distributed feeding into and buffered by storage.

I'm not sure how pumped hydro fits into the above scheme. From what I've read, it should also be relatively small, distributed and many.

Obviously pumped hydro is somewhat constrained geographically by geology.

Note that this distributed system will require changes in how the grid is managed and how frequency is maintained. (Damn that AC! )

[crawf]

Power blackouts just an SA thing right?
http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act ... 593fc046ca

[[Shuz]]

Could Myponga Resorvoir be a candidate for pumped hydro?

[bits]

Power blackouts just an SA thing right?
http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act ... 593fc046ca

Must have been caused by high winds causing all the NSW wind power to stop functioning.
If they still had their coal power station they would not have outages.

5 seconds on page 1 of a single Google search turns up a fair bit of news.
Only last month NSW had 40,000 without power because of a storm.
February 17, 2017:
http://www.australianewstoday.com/news/ ... bruary-17/

The month prior an explosion at a power station knocked out 7,500 for 2 days. Earlier that week the same group of 5,500 lost power also.
January 13, 2017:
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/blue-mountain ... trc0c.html

Also that week another 9,000.
January 11, 2017:
http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act ... d25dc79c00

October 5 2016:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weath ... ruzdm.html
June 4, 2016
http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national ... n-nsw.html

[SRW]

Took a while but finally received a few hundred bucks compo for my December outage. Adequate for what we experienced, but I know others who went without for much longer. I'd agree with removing the cap on compo to really light the fire under SA Power Networks to restore service in future events.