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 off 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.