By Jo Nova
Following the footsteps of Cuba
It’s not even summer and the Australian grid is having heart palpitations.
The Blob are in concert — blackouts might be at hand, and they want us to blame the heat (it’s code for climate change). Let’s get a grip, we’re only talking about a Sydney forecast of 33°C (all of 91F).
The ABC calls this “sweltering” and files it under “extreme weather events”. Channel Nine call it a “major heatwave”, which it might be if it were London.
For most of the last week, the AEMO (Australia Energy Market Operator) has been flashing red lights and ringing the LOR3 bell. That means they’ve been forecasting a full Level 3 Lack of Reserve, which means they can see blackouts coming. A level 3 is the most serious warning alarm. Not only is there no reserve power available if something goes wrong, there’s not even enough power for normal operations.
A week ago the AEMO saw blackouts coming for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — but by hook or by crook with finagling, they’ve got enough promised power now to turn of the sirens, though the lights are still flashing. Think of this an emergency room visit where the heart attack didn’t quite happen today, and probably won’t happen tomorrow, but the patient needs to pay attention.
Quite often in the last few years the AEMO would issue a level 1 warning and forecast a few hundred megawatts of shortage for a couple of hours. But by yesterday morning, in forecasts for Wednesday’s mildly warm day they were looking down the barrel of a 1,700 MW shortage. The full emergency period was not just an hour or two long but started at 11:30am and ran right through to 7:30pm at night.
And of course, it’s old coal’s fault:
Discussion at WattClarity suggest that Australia is running short of spare coal and gas plants to operate. It’s a combination of forced outages, unforced outages, and some maintenance taking longer than expected. Nearly one third of all thermal units bigger than 150MW in generation are out of action.
So geniuses, if a lack of coal causes blackouts, what’s going to happen when we shut down more coal?
Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy said the warning underscored the dangers of an energy system still largely reliant on coal.
“AEMO has confirmed that the combination of high temperatures across NSW and Queensland, along with coal plant outages will cause tight electricity supply forecasts in the coming days,” said Squadron boss Rob Wheals. “We know that Australia’s coal fleet is nearing the end of its economic and technical lifespan, with coal plant outages driving high price periods.”
— By Perry Williams, The Australian Heat spike puts NSW power grid on edge
There’s plenty more of that at Squadron Energy’s site, where they say ““Coal is killing affordability and reliability. Renewables are the answer.” The mystery is why even The Australian thought any of it was worth printing, except as a giggle.
Twenty years of Soviet style management is what is killing our grid
We got exactly what we paid for: Government subsidies to boost unreliable energy have, shock, created an unreliable grid. We used to have enough coal power so they could take a few units out for maintenance and it didn’t matter. But when we pay more for random generators, we drive reliable ones out of business. We then expect the owners to run vast finely tuned 500-ton machines faster and slower all the time to “fit in” with the wind and solar machines we don’t need. This reduces efficiency, which increases their costs, and no doubt the maintenance time. Then we kill off the long term prospects for the industry, call them stranded assets, and wonder why companies don’t value them, build new ones or fix up the old ones properly.
Crazy subsidies, make for crazy thinking, and then we get Squadron Energy telling us coal is killing affordability…
The Australian Grid is running close to the edge
The latest update suggests the level 3 alarm for Wednesday and Thursday has dropped to a level 2. The AEMO tell us the reserve requirement on Wednesday for our most populated state is 1,202 MW but, not so reassuringly, “the minimum capacity reserve is 0 MW”. That means, they think, that if everything works as expected, and the weather is not hotter than forecast, or more cloudy, or less windy, and nothing breaks, then the system will be just barely OK.
Usually the people in the control room like to have enough spare capacity on call, so if the biggest single generator trips out, the back up is there to keep the lights on. The minimum capacity reserve is not just a nice thing to have, its considered an essential part of normal operation. It’s the difference between the first world and the third world.
h/t David of Cooyal in Oz.
REFERENCES
AEMO notice 120894 contained the LOR3 1,731MW notice at 4:37am Monday. Later notice number 120946 updated the situation in NSW and number 120949 has cancelled the LOR3 in NSW for Thursday too. The AEMO have put out something like 1,000 notices in the last three weeks. It didn’t use to be this way.
Production lines run best when they have attained an equilibrium.
I can only imagine the damage and resulting costs from brown outs and blackouts on industries where there is insufficient back up power to keep the normal operating conditions, not to mention industries like Tomago where many operations can only be run with grid scale power.
Given a choice between switching of voter’s air conditioners or an entire plant what choice do you believe our career politicians will make? Especially when they know the result of industry shutdown will be diminished by main stream media and search engines will make sure sites like Jo’s will be missing from searches or just plain buried.
70
Thankyou for highlighting the ridiculousness of this.
The MSM no longer report news – their product, their only output, is anxiety.
That’s what they peddle: anxiety.
When you make people anxious, they click (MSM earns income), that watch (ditto).
If everyone understands that their product is anxiety, it’s easier to ignore them. No click, no watch, no income.
90
Aren’t potential blackouts news?
01
Perhaps there are enough stupid people out there who believe all this rubbish of coal and gas causing every problem known to mankind.
Having spent over 30 years prospecting in the Outback I mostly retreated back to the east coast when the temperature reached 42+ deg and this was generally the first or second week of November. Now 42 and 33 deg are extremes?
It’s called “covering your arse” in the face of blackouts!
20
NSW residents must all arise this morning & switch on every single electrical appliance they possess.
It won’t send your power bill over the top as the whole grid will go down. Teach the CC morons a huge lesson. The people are still in control. Crash the grid & maybe the message will get thru. Stop the insanity before we all are bankrupted. Stop the energy subsidies before the financial system goes “ belly up “! The general election may not come soon enough!
50
A coal plant does have an unfortunate tendency to fail after it has been blown up.
30
What hope have we got when even the Australian parrots the same BS and fra-d and seems to believe that perhaps the answer is more unreliable, toxic W & S?
Why can’t the average person use their brains and very simple logic and reason?
We need more reliable 24/7 base-load energy and we need it ASAP.
30
Perhaps the nightly news can start a blackout weather segment where any regions facing LOR1, LOR2, or LOR3 are highlighted. People don’t know how many of these near misses are happening. Or is it pointless to warn people of potential blackouts that (so far) usually don’t happen?
10
If renewables are so affordable and reliable (which they are not and possibly never will be) then the coal-fired industry would be dead already.
When virtually all our power was coming from fossil fuels we had absolutely no problems with “affordability and reliability.”
40
Coal and oil are products of millions of years of pressure put on vegetation. They are natural substances and should be recognised as such.
If they are used to produce other natural products such as plastics why does anyone worry?
20
Carbon dioxide makes the world work as a living entity.
Non-scientists tend to lie through their teeth to get what they want. What they want is a redistribution of the World’s wealth as evidenced by all the COPS that have ever been.
40
If grid collapse is imminent, a wise person would store potable water, canned foods, propane and other fuels, necessary medicines, cash money, and ammunition.
The AU govt has “managed” itself into an untenable position. Politics and Propaganda will mean very little when the power goes out for a week or two, or a few months.
This is going to be painfully educational. All the excuses/blame/finger pointing will be meaningless.
Have a plan to survive, because the only person you can rely upon is yourself. Govt will not help you. They got you into this mess.
It is surreal to watch this slow motion train wreck happen in real time. Decades and Trillions wasted on what provably does not work in reality, is coming to fruition.
Plan accordingly. Stay out of the cities. Know your neighbours . It’s gonna get Real.
10
I posted on the daily unthreaded the ground level solar for the last 3 days:
4.9kWh
2.1kWh
1.2kWh.
Clear sky this time of year 8.4kWh per day.
Today has started out similar to yesterday – humid with drizzle.
The reason why I looked this up is that my off-grid battery went low last night. First time that has happened in spring or summer months.
So clearly the rooftops across Victoria will not be doing much. And wind is not doing much.
There is a fundamental truth in maths that any big number by zero is still zero. So you can have a trillion wind turbines but their output can still be zero.
My current prediction for Snowy 2 is up and running by 2049. Florence has now done 1600m of the required 17,000m but there is a good chance another machine will be coming to help with its workload.
I learnt yesterday that the geotechnical assessment of the ground conditions for the project were well below par for a tunnelling project off this scale.
00
Who would have guessed, with the grid on the brink of collapse due to RE policies that we already knew would fail, the fake media are now trying to convince us that a normal warm summer day is “extreme heat”, caused by climate change. If the grid does collapse we already know they will blame climate change and the failure of the coal plants, and of course they will tell us that the solution is more RE. What’s playing out is a bit like giving a sick patient more and more cyanide to cure them from cyanide poisoning.
00
We definitely need more Green FFs to save more land for wilderness areas and we desperately need to stop the toxic , unreliable W & S disasters as fast as we can.
And we need to understand that FFs have allowed us to save an area the size of Nth America because we’ve been able to grow more food on less land over the last one hundred years.
Less farming land and more food is the best outcome and the data is readily available online.
00