Just another day of Wind turbine failure — 6GW in 16 hours
There was no cyclone, no storm, no national disaster, but our national infrastructure collapsed just the same. Blame a high pressure cell.
Last week TonyFromOz noticed that the output from all 79 industrial wind plants in Australia disappeared overnight from 6GW to just 0.4GW. Imagine if an entire state of coal plants failed in the space of 16 hours and nobody cared?
Wind plants fail all the time and wreak havoc on the grid. It’s just “business as usual” or rather “subsidies as usual”. The rainbow list of acronyms below the graph shows every single wind plant in five states of Australia was accounted for in this dismal tally.
Wind turbine failure: TonyFromOZ
Billions of dollars rests on whether we can stop high pressure cells forming near Adelaide…
As Tony points out, the more wind towers we build, the worse this mayhem will be. Weather comes and weather goes but when the doldrums hit, it wipes out all 79 industrial plants together. Only wind plants built outside the high pressure cell could smooth out this failure. Offshore wind farms would have failed at the same time as onshore ones too unless they were built halfway to New Zealand. To put that task in perspective, most offshore windfarms in the UK are built within 40km of the coast, but New Zealand is 4,000 kilometers away. Even floating windplants are built in 120m of water, but the Tasman Sea is 5,000 m deep.
Normal weather causes wind turbine weather mayhem on the NEM
The whole grid in the Australian NEM (National Energy Market) is roughly a 22GW enterprise, so more than a quarter of the total generation came and went — another quarter had to sit by and twiddle its thumbs waiting to quietly take over. No wonder Australian electricity is so expensive now. We pay unreliable generators to produce sacred green electrons and then pay another set of reliable generators to sit around and wait for when they will be needed. Who thought this would be cheaper — communists, maybe.
Indeed, if we include solar power variation, it’s even worse.
Australian Unreliable Renewables fell from 62% to 4% of national energy generation in 18 hours
Total renewable energy generation from all forms of solar and wind reached a peak at lunchtime Weds 3rd of May of 16.7 GW of generation. By 6am the next day that had fallen to 0.9GW. In a total system with an average of about 22GW of generation nearly 16 gigawatts was lost in 18 hours. Roughly 60% of total national generation failed and the system coped, but backing up this grid to cater for this huge failure comes at a massive cost.
Source Anero.id
That’s 95% of peak renewables output lost in less than a day.
As TonyfromOz points out, this is like a whole state fleet of coal plants failing at once
Imagine one of our largest states lost their entire coal fleet overnight?
For some perspective, ALL of the coal fired power in Victoria have a Nameplate of 4960MW, for three power plants with 10 Units, and that’s lower than the loss of power from ALL of these wind plants. If something like that failed (all 10 Units of the coal fired power in that State of Victoria) the State would be totally blacked out.
The same would apply for the State of New South Wales, where the total Nameplate for all of its coal fired plants is now 6149MW from four power plants with 12 Units (and that total is now lower since the recent closure of the Liddell plant, removing 2000MW for that coal fired total Nameplate for that State), and if all those 12 Units shut down, then that State would also be blacked out.
These are the two most populous States in Australia, and if something like that happened, it would be quite literally catastrophic, and it would be screamed about in the media (when the power did come back on) about the absolute and stupendous unreliability of coal fired power.
Luckily, in this case, with wind generation, there were many natural gas fired plants, and hydro power plants to take up the slack of such an immense loss of power, and because of that, and the fact that this is renewable power, now the sacred cow of the media, no one even knew, and it was not reported, huh, not that anyone even knew of this correlation in the first place.
The media silence on this is a lie by omission, but it’s still a lie, still dishonest, and we need to start protesting outside the ABC and SBS headquarters to draw attention to this deliberate deceit to hide the failures of their sacred totem and co-dependent industries. Those who depend on the government lie for each other all the time. It’s no accident.
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PS: For those who don’t know Anton Lang (TonyfromOz) lost his wife of 42 years just a few weeks ago. You can read his accolades to Barbara Lang and share your commiserations. A remarkable marriage.