Broken Hill Solar Plant | Photo by Jeremy Buckingham
By Jo Nova
The lights went out in Broken Hill. A storm blew over seven transmission towers connecting it to 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. School has 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
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, 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.
260
I guess you reap what you sow. Bowen take note.
190
Unfortunately David, Bowen won’t take note, at least not until we have a major blackout in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra.
150
My commiserations to the people of Broken Hill who are the current crash test dummies as intermittent electricity generation demostrates its inherent weaknesses.
140
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.
120
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.
180
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.
80
Renewable energy is safe and effective.
30
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?
40
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
20
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!
40
better get some more diesel in to power my generator – the big blackout is coming
30
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.
00