I’m very cautiously poking this sleeping bear..
But I just read an article saying that South Australia has been cut off from the rest of the national power grid since January 31st.
I know there’s been plenty of other big things happening around the country lately, but given the massive uproar last time those power lines got cut I was pretty surprised this one hadn’t gotten the slightest mention anywhere around here.
Apparently this time a 500kV transmission line was cut, much bigger than the 275kV lines hit by tornadoes before the South Australia system black in 2016.
The technical stuff is way over my head, but it sounds like the wind and batteries saved the day this time. Perhaps that’s why the usual shouty voices have been so quite..
From the article;
“When the storms hit on the afternoon of January 31 South Australia had been exporting about 460MW of capacity to Victoria.
The loss of the link meant that South Australia had way too much generation and the event pushed frequency levels up dangerously high. But several wind farms responded – as they are now programmed to do – by immediately reducing their output.
And the batteries helped by immediately ramping up to charge and therefore add load to the grid – and then quickly change direction again as the frequency fluttered.
Some gas generators also responded, but the bulk of the instant response came from the wind farms, the three big batteries and two of the bigger solar farms. Rooftop solar also played a role, with inverters switching off – as they are now expected to do in such situations – adding to system demand, which is what the market operator wanted at the time.
Indeed, it was the speed and the accuracy of the inverter-based technologies that AEMO engineers say was the key to bringing the frequency excursion back under control, keeping the lights on and preventing the type of catastrophic result that occurred in the “system black” in September 2016.
What happened to South Australia is about as bad as it gets, but without coal, and without hydro, it has been managed in exemplary fashion. And it should be a tribute to good engineering, and an endorsement of renewable and battery technologies, and of the Liberal state government’s goal of reaching “net 100 per cent” renewables by 2030.”
