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Bill Leak is a cartoonist, who did a cartoon highlighting the dismal state of some dysfunctional familes in central Australia. I can’t show you that cartoon and we can’t discuss appalling crime statistics nor why “women of a certain ethnic group are 30 times (or 80 times) more likely to be beaten and hospitalized.” Two women die every week but we can’t talk about the problem of people who stomp on someone else’s head because words might offend someone.)
Steyn points out that some Australians think that there are higher priorities than removing 18C, but I’m with him, all freedoms start with free speech. Until we get rid of 18C we can’t even discuss other problems.
The Human Rights Commission (HRC) takes $25 million dollars a year from Australians to stop people talking.
Steyn — The point of the HRC is to shut people up. His advice is not to defend or debate the forbidden topic, but to make the HRC the topic:
I hope The Australian won’t compound that mistake by vigorously defending the cartoon on its merits. When Maclean’s and I ran afoul of the equivalent Canadian law – Section 13 – over a book excerpt from America Alone, the most important decision we made was not to defend the content of the piece: the facts, the quotes, the statistics, the conclusions, etc. Our opponents were not disputing our position; they were disputing our right to have a position.
Likewise, Mr Leak’s opponents are not attempting to engage him in debate; they’re attempting to close down the debate. And there’s no point getting in a debate with someone whose only argument is “Shut up – or else.”
In that sense, the Australian “human rights” regime and the Charlie Hebdo killers are merely different points on the same continuum: They’re both in the shut-up business, and they shut you up pour encourager les autres. They know that, for every cartoonist they silence, a thousand more will never peep up in the first place.
So this isn’t a debate about aboriginal policy or Islamic imperialism or anything else. It’s a debate about whether we’re free to debate. I take the view that the Australian state, like the Canadian state, should not be in the shut-up business. And, when they are, it’s they who are the issue, not you. When it’s a contest between a book or cartoon, on the one hand, and, on the other, a guy who says, “You can’t say that!”, it’s the latter who’s on trial. If you’re on the side that’s saying “Shut up!”, you’re on the wrong side.
[UPDATE: The sleazy tone-deaf Australian “Race Discrimination” Commissar, Tim Soutphommasane, confirms my point with the usual bland evasions of his totalitarian bureaucracy:
Cartoons will be subject to all matter of public debate. It’s a healthy part of our democracy that we have that debate.
Sorry. A legal action is not a “debate”. Mr Leak is being “subject to” not debate but state thought-policing. Because ideological enforcers like Soutphommasane find debate too tiresome and its results too unpredictable. Which is why he gets a third of a million a year from Australian taxpayers to prevent debate.]
The likes of Commissar Soutphommasane are not interested in a debate with you; they’re interested in eliminating you from the debate…
I am, unfortunately, not being satirical when I say we can’t discuss the deadly and dismal problems affecting certain ethnic groups. Please in comments, be mindful, that this post is about Section 18C.
The law reads:
Offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin
(1) It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:
- (a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and
- (b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.
The Human Rights Commission helpful explains here with examples just how vague, arbitrary, and subjective this law is. No Australian can know in advance if they are acting illegally unless they say nothing about anything, and that’s the point. No matter how honest you are and despite your good intentions or even if you speak the truth someone else gets paid to decide if a phrase is “likely” to offend, and to judge whether the same words might be legal or illegal if they are art, or you are trying to be funny. Are you a licensed artist? Is your intent “comedic”. The HRC will whip out the Funny-0-meter, the Mind-reader, and Their Lens of Artisticiness.
The IPA wants to repeal 18C. It should take five minutes in parliament to get rid of the words “insult” and “offend”.
Some thoughts that are used in debate,
May fall foul of an arm of the state,
And one can’t, by the way,
Suggest thoughts we can’t say,
As to do so invites a court date.
–Ruairi
9.4 out of 10 based on 85 ratings
Tragic news about moose today — the climate used to be the same for 65 million years, so moose are unprepared to deal with the sudden extra degree on the modern Earth-Perfect-Thermostat.
Don’t cry. Moose are declining:
The reason for the decline is complicated. Wolves have taken moose, and grizzly bears have been expanding their presence.
But climate could be the biggest challenge. Part of the problem is ticks. A moose with too many of the parasites during the winter can lose its hair and freeze to death.
We all know, before Columbus there was one perfect quota of moose, bear, wolf. The numbers didn’t vary from the sacred Gaia Triangle Ratio (whatever it was). There were no cycles. Moose never declined. Then man came, used air conditioners in Florida, caused tick outbreaks in Saskatoon, and da fur fell off doz’ mooses. Cold moose!
In general, moose are simply better adapted to colder temperatures. When it’s too warm, they spend more time in the shade trying to cool down and less time feeding, Courtemanch said.
You might have thought fur-free moose might like warmer weather. They just can’t win eh?
“The warmer winters and warmer summers are incredibly stressful to them,” she said. “They’re so heat-stressed all the time. It cascades into poor body condition for females, and that impacts their ability to have a calf. They are so stressed they can’t put on enough weight every year.”
Sounds like da stressed mooses need psychotherapy. If we stopped trying to buy nice weather with solar and wind we could afford a psychotherapist for every mother moose. Stop a windfarm, save a moose!
/sarc
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What are these people on? Moose survived 60,000 years of climate change
Moose struggled through ice-ages and a holocene optimum when the arctic was so warm there was no sea-ice for thousands of years. I did a long 0.89 second search for “evolution of the moose” and the first paper that turns up tells us that moose have been squeezed through population bottlenecks many times and are noted for their ability to adapt to a changing environment.
One day, news outlets may teach writers to use google.
Hundertmark and Bowyer, 2004:
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9.3 out of 10 based on 84 ratings
Good news. India plans to add more fertilizer to the global air which will help feed the world. There is no charge.
India will become the world’s number 2 miner of coal by 2020, overtaking the US. There are plans to ramp up from mining 634 million tons to 1.5 billion metric tons by 2020. That’s only 3 years away. China’s total coal use doesn’t even fit on this graph. As best as anyone can guess, China uses 3.7 billion ton each year.
How’s that ground breaking, world leading Paris agreement going?
 …
Australia is the worlds largest coal exporter but our total exports of coal in 2014/15 were a tiny 393Mt (of both thermal and metallurgical coal). I’ve marked that in blue on the graph. We are only a large exporter because everyone else keeps the coal for their own use.
More mining of India’s coal,
Fills another significant role,
That of plant-food increase,
By CO2 release,
Which should really be all mankind’s goal.
— Ruairi
h/t to GWPF
9.8 out of 10 based on 51 ratings
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8.5 out of 10 based on 23 ratings
Financial Post, Terence Corcoran
The Green industry has done over Ontario consumers. Government control of the electricity market was “cheered on by a growing industrial complex of wind and solar promoters backed by a large contingent of financial firms, big name consultants, fee-collecting law firms and major corporations. All were anxious to play a lucrative role fulfilling renewables objectives”.
Ontario was going to be the North American leader in renewable energy. It would save lives, create jobs, cost nothing, but instead the electricity bills have doubled, no lives were saved and the only jobs created were temporary (and almost certainly cost more jobs in other areas due to high electricity costs). The only “success” for the extra wind and solar power that’s locked into the grid is that it has “saved” some meaningless CO2 emissions at the exorbitant, flagrant cost of $250 per ton. Green energy was supposed to save $4.4billion in healthcare and other costs, but virtually none of that materialized.
 Costs have gone from 5.5c a KWh in 2006 to 11c KWh in 2016. (How is it still so incredibly cheap ask Aussies? We are the largest coal exporters in the world and have some of the largest uranium reserves but Australians pay from 25c to 36c per KWh* and the currencies are 1:1).
According to Terence Corcoran things are so on the nose that the premier can’t even mention hydro without getting booed. The costs of going green have been estimated at $170 billion over 30 years, and while smog has decreased somewhat, no one is sure whether that was due to the coal stations closing in Ontario, or is linked to US changes. In any case, the coal plants could have been fitted with smog-cleaning gear for a tiny fraction of the cost.
The Ontario government has finally started canceling new wind projects, but there are long term contracts for current wind farms that go on for years. Jan Carr was head of the Ontario Power Authority and says the government is “finally waking up to Ontario’s electricity carnage.”
Ontario’s Society of Professional Engineers has issued many reports describing how dismal the green policies are, but the Premier’s office appear to have been fooled completely by the Green machine. A former head of the OSPE, Paul Acchione, says “because they know how to turn a light bulb on and off, they’ll issue policy statements on the most complex engineering system on the planet”. He said the Premier’s office was pretty much running the grid and “hiring political scientists and environmentalists because they thought they were the experts”. (Does Australia have an OSPE equivalent, wonders Jo?)
But demand for electricity has cratered as the prearranged contracts for green energy have surged, and Canadians are paying for expensive electricity that comes at the wrong time of day and isn’t needed.
In a normal market when supply outstrips demand, prices are supposed to fall. But put a government in charge and the most expensive provider can get a guarantee to get paid, even if their product isn’t needed.
A bunch of parasites fooled the Premier and they are getting rich by selling expensive electrons that are supposed to change the weather 50 years from now.
h/t to Clipe, Pat and David B.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 90 ratings
Yet another paper showing the spooky non-relationship with the local thermonuclear reactor. Thanks to climate models we all know that jiggles in solar radiation mean nothing much to Earth, otherwise we might wonder if the pattern of lows in sunlight and highs in floods meant something…
The River Ammer is in Southern Germany, and Markus Czymzik and others dug through the sediments nearby and graphed the flood layers alongside the small changes in solar radiation (TSI). They noticed that a less active sun correlates with more floods. At the low point of every solar cycle there appears to be more rain. (Don’t buy a house on a floodplain in southern Germany in the next few years.)
There is a pretty neat correlation there in the last 90 years, and then in the second graph they take that correlation back to 3,500BC, back when the Funnelbeaker culture was making nice pots in the same area. This same odd coincidence of the sun and rainfall patterns was also found by researchers in Chile, China and Australian and Indonesia. Low solar activity tends to occur at the same time as the winter jet stream in the North Atlantic gets blocked. And solar activity seems to affect Earth’s atmospheric pressure. None of these things occurs in climate models.
Repeat after me, the sun has no effect on our climate. …
 … Naturally, TSI itself is probably not the driver, it is just a marker for some other effect operating within and from the sun itself. (Read more on the possible mechanisms below). It’s another reminder of what the global climate models don’t know, and explains why they are so terrible at predicting rain.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 69 ratings
Could Australia end up with synchronous failure across states?
When wind power is maxing out it’s bad for grid stability — it pushes out the reliable spinning inertia — the massive rolling turbines that relentlessly pull the grid back to 50Hz. Here’s a graph of SA and Victoria wind farms last month, and you can see that for all the thousand kilometers that might separate them, they are controlled by much larger common weather patterns.
 Wind power in South Australia and Victoria often both max out or crash together. Tom Quirk looks out our national grid in light of the SA blackout debacle. The message from South Australia is that wind power does not make for nice stable and synchronous grids. As I mentioned before the whole idea of alternating current (or AC electricity) is about the exact push pull of electrons at a set frequency. The grid lives and dies by its frequency. We can’t add a 53Hz current to a 47Hz one and get a 50 Hz average. When different frequencies meet we get interference patterns — a mess of spikes and dips. Say hello to Lumpy Electricity. Say goodbye to your computer.
Indeed when the frequency hit 47Hz the Victorian interconnector said goodbye to the whole state of South Australia. (See graph 1 at that link).
Tom Quirk expands on this and talks about how heavy spinning turbines (like coal, but not wind) are able to share the load of frequency changes in the grid and restore the frequency back to the sacred 50Hz. He estimates that once wind power supplies more than 20% of the total grid, things can get hairy, and with South Australia at 40% and Victoria planning to jump to 20 – 30% now is the time to figure out those limits and the costs. (Ten years ago would’ve been better). Don’t cry now, but Queensland’s target seems to be 50%. Let’s not mention Bill Shorten, potential PM, who floated some fantasy that the whole nation could get to 50%. The least mad state might be WA. Time to secede? Our state is not on the “national” grid — it’s islanded already and every day. That might be what saved us from copying South Australia.
Please can one government somewhere do a cost-benefit estimate on the value of cooling Australia with bat-killing giant fans?
As Tom points out, wind power needs a lot of transmission lines (and ideally the type that don’t blow over too easily). New transmission lines cost $1 to $3 million per kilometre. So add that to the cost of “wind”. Each kilometer of wire buys an awful lot of cheap coal powered electricity.
Victoria currently has a bit less wind power than SA, but it’s a much bigger market and for some baffling reason, wants to increase its wind power to twice or more the size of SA. Remembering that SA is pretty much utterly dependent on the Victorian grid right now. (Don’t miss figure three below, where Victorian fossils make ten times the electricity that South Australian fossils do). Without enough spinning reserve, the dreaded instability infection can spread. Imagine how much fun it will be if the Victorian part of the national network becomes unstable like SA? Consider that weather systems in Australia blow from South Australia across to NSW and Victoria, so wind production is often all on, or all off at the same time. Every MW of wind capacity added needs to be backed up. (Which raises the obvious question of why we don’t just use the damn synchronous back up in the first place and skip the asynchronous, unreliable stuff?). Are we trying to change the weather?
The owners of Hazelwood coal fired plant in Victoria are thinking of closing it. Like Port Augusta, which closed in May, Hazelwood is struggling to return great profits in an artificially distorted market that favours intermittent “climate changing” energy over reliable cheap predictable electrons.
If Hazelwood closes and is replaced with wind power, then South Australia’s unstable network will be paired with another network that will frequently also have “lots” of wind or “not much” and need spinning reserve at the same time. On those days the interconnector might not save one state from the other. If NSW copies the meme, it gets even worse.
— Jo
Problems and Limits for Wind Power
Guest post by Tom Quirk
ABOUT: A founding director of the Victorian Power Exchange and then Deputy Chairman of VENCorp ( Victorian energy networks for electricity and gas)
The blackout in South Australia on the 28th September has received worldwide attention. The reasons for the blackout are not completely understood but it is a combination of the collapse of transmission lines, the extreme variations in the power output of wind farms and the stability of an inter-connect to the state of Victoria.
There is no doubt that the necessary geographical spread of wind farms requires long transmission lines. This can be seen in Figure 1, where wind farms to the east and west of Spencer’s Gulf need transmission lines of up to 600 km to Adelaide and wind farms in the south east of the state have some 300 km to bring power from near the border with Victoria. There is no “ring main” that gives security of supply for some of the distant wind farms and although the wind farms produce on average only 30% of their maximum output, the transmission lines must be able to handle the maximum possible output for all wind farms that feed into the transmission network. New transmission lines cost $1 to $3 million per kilometre so the economic case for increasing the network may not have justified its cost and the difficulty of assessing the security value of new connections.
 Figure 1: The Electranet South Australian electricity transmission network.
The total installed wind farm capacity for South Australia is 1576 MW. The State of Victoria has an ambitious plan to move from the present 1242 MW of installed wind farms to add 3000 to 4000 MW to provide 20% to 30% of the electricity demand from wind power.
For Victoria, which supplies the balancing power to South Australia, an increase of supply from wind will increase the risk of supply failure. This is due to the weather patterns of south-east Australia that give rise to correlated wind in South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. This has been shown in published analysis from Paul Miskelly in a peer reviewed journal Energy & Environment in 2012.
This correlation can be seen in the wind farm performance in September 2016 shown in Figure 2 where the wind farm variations are larger in South Australia reaching 1400 MW while Victoria lags with 1000 MW.
Figure 2: Correlation of wind farm output for South Australia and Victoria. Source http://energy.anero.id.au/
The performance of fossil fuel generators for South Australia and Victoria is shown in Figure 3. For South Australia the gas fired thermal power station at Torrens Island and gas turbines partially even out the wind power variations. The balance of supply comes from Victoria through the Heywood inter-connect. Victoria has a significant wind farm contribution to meet local Victorian demand. However the bulk of supply comes from the brown coal burning power stations of the Latrobe Valley with Hazelwood and Loy Yang as load-following generators. The gas turbine generators and particularly the Murray hydro power generators match much of the Victorian daily demand variations.
 Figure 3:- Upper South Australian fossil fuel supply and – Lower; Victorian fossil fuel supply. Source http://energy.anero.id.au/
Managing the supply system requires a constant frequency of 50 hertz within limits of +/- 0.15 hertz while at the same time meeting the electricity demand load.
The regulation of the system is given to load-following generators but their task has become increasingly difficult as increasing variations in wind supply has been added to demand variations. Coal burning generators have borne the brunt of this regulation but gas turbine generators also play a part as do hydro power plants, the latter two forms of generation providing the most immediate response to load changes.
The need for synchronous spinning
What is also not readily appreciated is the importance of the very real property of “system inertia” that is inherent in a group of generators that are operated at synchronous speed. All conventional generators connected to the grid in Australia spin, very precisely, each at a speed which corresponds to 50 Hz. This figure of 50 Hz can be thought of as 3000 cycles per minute (50 times 60). For a generator with two magnetic poles, its spin, or synchronous, speed is 1500 rpm. For a 4-pole generator, the spin speed is 750 rpm. The generators are electrically locked into this same, hence synchronous, speed. Indeed, any generator which might begin to stray a small amount for some reason from synchronous speed is automatically pulled back into lock. This synchronicity of operation is an inherent property of the operation of these synchronous machines: There is no requirement for any sort of active control system to bring about this speed regulation, that is, it is inherently fail-safe.
This property of synchronicity leads to another property, a property that becomes critically important in dealing with transient faults, overloads, short circuits and open circuits. As the spinning rotors of the generators are all locked together at synchronous speed, the mechanical inertia of the rotating system is the sum of the rotational inertias of all of those locked-in-synchronous spinning rotors. If there is a sudden load increase, then that load is shared by all the generators, completely automatically. In this instance, the speed of ALL of them will drop together, to the same extent. This speed change IS the means by which the change in the load is sensed and a throttling correction applied. But, what is important for transient changes in load, such as a flashover due to a lightning strike, a short or open circuit due to a transmission cable disconnection or a generator dropping out, is that, on a network of synchronous generators, any sudden load change can be absorbed by the collected sum of the operating generators.
This inherent safety in dealing with transient faults seems to have been ignored in the lead-up to the severe weather event that affected South Australia on 28 September 2016. It was important that as much synchronous generation as possible ought to have been powered up, spinning in synchronism with those other, few, synchronous generators that were actually operating on the South Australian grid on the day.
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9.5 out of 10 based on 105 ratings
Apparently CO2 can absorb sunsets:
The Climate Change Challenge will be held at the Lismore campus from 10am where students from ages 8 to 15 can take part in the ‘photo voice’ competition, where they can use photography to have a voice on the issue and win prizes.
‘Some students take photos of beautiful things such as sunsets or waterways and then write about how it could be lost or destroyed because of climate change. Some take photos of land that has been bulldozed; they are very aware about how plants repair from damage, produce oxygen, absorb CO2 and so on.
Challenge to Grownups: take a photo of anything and then write about how Southern Cross Uni is destroying our children’s chance to understand it.
The agitprop is barely disguised as science: Climate Change and Me — That’s our tax dollars ruining their education. Is there anyone is Lismore who can go along tomorrow and join in?
Thanks to Tim Blair for The Sun sets on Sunsets. He comments that Southern Cross University, “is launching some kind of Greens-breeding program in NSW schools”
h/t Andrew.
9.4 out of 10 based on 68 ratings
The World’s Best Practice climate models predicted Australia would be hotter than normal in September, instead the maximum temperature anomaly was 1 to 5 degrees below average across most of Australia.
That long range prediction was made all the way back on August 21. Four weeks later it was obvious it was wrong.
 Prediction of a hot September versus actual outcome. (Click to enlarge). Thanks to Warwick Hughes who saw this failure coming and The Marcus Review who points out the mismatch and goes on to log how much the BOM predictions for October have transformed from hotter than average to cold cold cold.
The BOM bravely predicted Tasmania would have an 80% chance of having hotter than average maximums. Temperatures ended up being spot on average. What’s 80% certainty worth? About the same as 95%.
Thanks to Chris Gillham who pointed out the big cold blob of ocean surrounding Australia on the south and west that gave Perth its coldest ever September nights. Wasn’t that cold blob present on August 21 when those models were run? On August 25th, the BOM predicted Perth’s chances of being cooler than average at 50:50. Toss a coin, or use a climate model? The prevailing winds for Tassie come straight of the cold sea.
9.8 out of 10 based on 119 ratings
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9.3 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
International governments have made a power play against Donald Trump by ratifying an international climate deal earlier than expected, effectively preventing him from “canceling” the deal as he has promised to do.
That means Trump, should he be elected president in November, could not “cancel” or renegotiate the terms of the agreement.
Which army is going to make the US pay?
More than anything else the Global Parasites are afraid of free voters and November 8th. That’s why this “Paris Agreement” charade had to be rushed in to pip the US election, and the news headlines are full of meaningless terms like “coming into force”. There is no international force. There are no auditors or policemen that are going to turn up to Fort Knox and take the money, or jail the “wrong doers”.
The UN says the Paris deal is done, because it wants to fool the voters into submission. But the US voters can choose a Congress that disagrees. Nothing stops the US from simply ignoring an international law. Which army is going to make the US pay?
 … It’s a bluff designed to fool US voters into thinking it is a done deal. It’s fake in so many ways — most of the countries signing up have signed up to do nothing, they are not even legally bound to achieve that low bar (should, should, should, not shall, shall, shall.) The internationally “legally binding” stuff is only that — oo-err: countries have to make up a plan and report on it. And what does “legally binding” mean when it is only backed by “international law”?
US citizens are not part of an international government, nor bound by laws and fantasies concocted by foreign committees they didn’t elect.
The Climate-by-force group know they are selling a vision the voters won’t buy if they have a choice, so at every step the plan now is to not offer voters a choice about paying for climate change “action”. The Trump phenomenon is completely foiling those plans. He’s giving US voters a choice. In Australia whenever they’ve had a real choice they’ve said “No” to climate taxes and trading schemes. Polls show US voters rate climate at the bottom of every list, a third think it’s a hoax, and 42% of US adults don’t want to pay even $12 a year to stop climate change. Fully 61% say climate debate is not over.
The only real international force that applies is the force of shame — of badgering by diplomats to say “tut, tut”. Who cares?
It’s time real democracies remembered what thousands of men fought and died for — not to be ruled by foreigners.
Obama was elected by the people and for the people, but so was the US congress.
Trump could ignore the goals that Obama has set — and some conservatives expect he would do just that.
William Yeatman, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, said Trump could also insist the Senate needs to ratify the deal and send it to lawmakers, who would likely vote it down.
But Trump would have the power to shape American policy in other ways, including by nominating a ninth justice to the Supreme Court.
The high court is likely to decide the fate of Obama’s biggest climate change regulation, likely in its next term. — The Hill
h/t pat
Politicians are eager to please,
And oblige the U.N. on their knees,
But Mr. Trump ‘s not P.C.,
And may set nations free,
By rejecting their climate decrees.
— Ruairi
UPDATE: The Washington Post agrees (though in fear). What President Obama gave by simple decree could surely be removed just as easily:
A President Trump could wreck progress on global warming
IT TOOK global negotiators a quarter-century to strike the Paris climate agreement, an international accord aimed at slowing global warming. The agreement represents the best hope for a world in whichno one country acting alone can do enough to fight this global threat. Donald Trump could destroy the agreement with a stroke of a pen, and with it any hope that the world will keep the planet’s temperature within the boundaries scientists say are safe.
The Paris deal represents a major U.S. commitment, but it is not a treaty with the force of law. President Obama submitted the U.S. emissions goal; Mr. Trump could withdraw it just as easily.
9.6 out of 10 based on 101 ratings
Did anyone ask the voters if they wanted to spend $10 – $20k per family on a program to change the weather?
Renewables are all over the media in Oz. Suddenly free energy has a cost. Before SA knocked itself out, mainstream pundits talked of “ambitious” targets, now the term is “aggressive”.
We nationally have an obscene 23% “renewables” target — burning billions so our great grandchildren might be a millionth of a degree cooler. But some of our states are even crazier (SA, Victoria, and Queensland) and the Federal Minister for Energy is telling the nuttier ones off, pointing out the cosmic cost of achieving their even higher goals.
Josh Frydenberg sounds halfway sensible:
“Victorians for years have enjoyed some of the lowest energy prices across the country, which has created jobs, investment and growth. But now Victorians, like other Labor states, are being threatened with higher prices to fund ill-considered renewable energy targets where there is no practical and realistic road map to get there.” — The Australian
The preliminary estimate from Mr Frydenberg’s department:
The capital cost of the extra renewable capacity would be least $14bn in Victoria and $27bn in Queensland, making up a total of $41bn, according to the preliminary estimate prepared in Canberra.
Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said in June that consumers would pay only “cents per week” for that state’s additional target.
That’s $2300 per man woman and child in Victoria and $5600 per Queenslander.
Did anyone ask the voters if they wanted to spend $10 – $20k per family on a program to change the weather?
Let’s give that a go and find out what percentage of Australian families would prefer to buy something else, like a bathroom, a new hip, a holiday, or a boat? Can we have a plebiscite on that?
But Frydenberg also says the states “should accept the national target instead”. Bollockspeak, says Jo. States should do their own thing and let the free market figure it out. They should do something radical like a cost-benefit analysis on using solar panels to stop the sea rising. The first state to dump renewables and offer cheap continuous coal or nukes will reap the rewards as businesses pull up stakes and move. That state will grow rich, be fully employed and be able to afford bigger, better national parks and grand indulgences like saving spotted toads, rare anemone, and whatever they fancy.
9.6 out of 10 based on 111 ratings
Finally, the gritty info we’ve been waiting for: The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) preliminary report. The message here is of how a combination of both transmission towers failing and probably the auto-shut-off of wind farms combined in 12 seconds to crash the South Australian system. It’s looking awfully bad for the wind industry. The AEMO pins the crash on the sudden reduction from the wind generators, but stops short of declaring why they dropped power so suddenly. Was it the auto-shut-offs, lightning strikes, a software glitch, turbine failure, or was it a key transmission line that broke? Reneweconomy is about the last-man-standing trying to defend the wind industry in Australia. Giles Parkinson argues it was the third transmission line that took out some wind generation.
Even if the third transmission tower took out two “farms”, the fragility of wind-dominated grids is on display. And above and beyond this, South Australian electricity is a management debacle. The only question is, which mistake was the worst: Is this is epic indulgence of running the wind farms flat out in a storm only to trigger a blackout with their auto shut offs? There’s a compelling case, but there are tenths or less of a second between events in these graphs, and no confirmation.
If it was transmission towers that ultimately broke the system, things don’t look better for wind power which needs so many long transmission lines to capture energy from sites spread far and wide, rather than connecting a few centralized spots like coal stations — and that’s expensive (thanks to Tom Quirk for pointing out that).
We’re still left wondering why were these towers so weak, was it freak tornados — where is that documentation? Then there is the unknowable — could it have been prevented if the Port Augusta coal station was still running, or if the wind farms had turned off earlier in an orderly fashion, or if the transmission towers had been solid?
The bottom line is that wind energy comes at a very high cost and makes the system either very expensive or horribly fragile or both. Given that wind farms aren’t providing cheap electricity — when the infrastructure and the costs of having back up “spinning reserve” and baseload is taken into account — what’s the point of adding all this risk to the system? To change the weather?
How many engineers saw this epic fail coming?
The grim detail: The SA electricity network went from go to woe in 12 seconds
There were faults on three transmission towers over 12 seconds. At the same time there was a sudden “reduction” in output from six windfarms within 6 seconds. Presumably this is when the storm triggered the automatic cutoffs at wind farms, but we can’t say that from this report — it all overlapped. What a mess! So play forensic detective with me and pick through this data.
It appears that the reduction of generation in Hornsdale and Snowtown II wind farms were the killer last straw, but it also appears that the Heywood interconnector to Victoria was already well over the safe limit in the seconds before this. Too much energy was being pulled over into South Australia — perhaps the interconnector was destined to fail anyway. Against that is the diabolical size of the combined Hornsdale–Snowtown crash of 180MW.
The storm rolled in with a north-west to south-east diagonal frontline and must have hit several wind farms and transmission lines at the same time. The dominant form of power in SA at the time was from wind, and mostly from a bunch of “farms” to the north. All up, wind was supplying 880MW out of a total of 1900MW.
This is the twelve seconds that mattered. This is how fast the whole system had to shut down.
(Note that in Grid-land, an open line is a bad thing, it means “no electricity”. A closed line is good, it has no gap where the electrons can’t flow.)
 Fig 4 SA Frequency during the event (Click to enlarge) From 4:18 and 15 seconds things unraveled very fast (that’s AEST time).
This graph below shows the leading six minutes of the main Heywood interconnector – it was happily supplying 525MW, but as the wind farms cut out up to 800MW was being pulled out of Victoria (that’s the death-spike!). That was 200MW over the design limits. At 15.8 seconds after 4:18pm the interconnector shut down.
 The death-spike of the lifeline interconnector to Victoria just before it cut out. The safe limit is 600MW.
In the table below we see that in the space of 6 seconds, six windfarms suddenly reduced their output. The last two windfarms took out 180MW in two tenths of a second from the system at 4:18 and 15.1 and 15.2 seconds. This reduction is what caused the massive overdraw from Victoria through Heywood, which then shut down six hundredths of a second later. (As pure electro-trivia, we note that briefly Hornsdale and Snowtown were sucking 2MW each from a system about to collapse.)
 (Click to enlarge) Here are the locations of these windfarms thanks to Aneroid Energy:
Almost all the ones that matter are lined up in a row, but it was Snowtown II shutting a tenth of a second after Hornsdale that were the straws that broke Electronet’s back.
 A map of the location of the windfarms in South Australia (Aneroid Energy). For the nerds, the detailed timing of the event follows:
The transmission lines were failing first from 4:16pm, and by 4:18pm (and 13 seconds) the third transmission line was out of action. It’s not clear here how much generation power was lost from these transmission lines. (See my adapted grid map below). The AEMO remarks that there was no change in generation with the first tower out, but doesn’t say anything about the second and third.
 (Click to enlarge) The Grid Map
Just to see if those transmission lines that fell were critical I tried to mark them on the grid map below. Using the descriptions of “Davenport — Belalie” for example I marked crosses between those two locations (but I can’t pinpoint where the exact break is). The AEMO report (3.1.2) doesn’t say if break number 2 blocked the two windfarms North Brown Hill and Bluff at 4:18:08pm, though the graph below this shows them reducing their output almost immediately after, but apparently still generating something according to the table above. Hornsdale is not marked on this map (as far as I can see). It is close to North Brown Hill but the two “farms” are reported as reducing output 6 seconds apart which suggests that transmission tower fall #2 did not block both (the cross was probably left of where I marked it). We’re not absolutely sure it even blocked one…
 Grid Map. South Australia. The transmission towers that fell in the critical two minutes leading up to the blackout are marked as blue crosses (estimated). The red arrows point to the wind farms. Does anyone know where Port Augusta used to fit on this schematic? UPDATE: I’m guessing it would be between Davenport and Cultana and Olympic Dam. ie on the far left main line after the Brinkworth branch).
NOTE: I haven’t marked in all 22 transmission tower faults, so a clear line does not mean a fault had not already occurred in one of the other 4 tower failures before the blackout. (Can anyone figure out where those failures were and if they were fixed before the blackout?)
During the 12 second Interconnector spike
Clearly the 200MW draw on the interconnector is the key moment. So here is a graph of that spike spread out over 12 seconds:
 Figure 3 Flow on Heywood – South East interconnector during the event (click to enlarge) The thing that triggered the beginning of the spike above 600MW was the Davenport–Belalie 275kV line (cross 2 on the schematic grid map), followed in a fraction of a second by four wind farms reducing their output. At this point the interconnector with Victoria is already far over the safe operating limit. Then the Davenport — Mt Lock line breaks, pushing things up higher, followed a tenth of a second later by the last two bigger windfarm reductions, the 180MW pair which pushes the draw from Victoria over the interconnector to nearly 900MW.
Can we blame that transmission tower?
Giles Parkinson at Reneweconomy puts on a brave face and argues that the critical point was the third tower (Davenport – Mt Lock) going out:
…the Coalition will point to the loss of 315MW of wind power highlighted by AEMO in the press release after the collapse of the last of the transmission lines that preceded the failure of the inter-connector. At which point all the remaining gas and wind generators tripped.
But there is a question about whether this loss of wind capacity really mattered. The data in the actual report suggests not.
Wind generators were producing a total of 883MW at the time (gas was providing 330MW and 613MW was coming from Victoria) – and had ridden out the loss of the first two transmission lines.
A small amount of wind capacity dropped out after the second transmission line collapsed, possibly – the operators say – as the result of lightning strikes and a software glitch that has since been rectified.
But as this chart below shows, there was no impact on frequency. [That’s Fig 4 at the top of this post — Jo] It was only the failure of the third transmission line at 1615.18 that some generation was lost, the frequency dropped the system went black 1.2 seconds later.
Not so. The third line went down at 14:18:13. The frequency of the SA grid started falling apart from 4:18 and 15 seconds, exactly when Snowtown and Hornsdale went down. The frequency was smashed when Heywood went down, but the two faults of transmission lines causes jiggles, it was the loss of 180MW that dropped the frequency to 49.25Hz which tripped the interconnector.
The loss of the third transmission line took away the delivery mechanism for two other wind farms, which suggests it wouldn’t have mattered which power source was operating on that line. Within another half a second, all remaining gas and wind plants had gone after the interconnector tripped.
Giles seems to be sure the third tower stopped generation from two wind farms, but it doesn’t say that in the AEMO report. Hornsdale wind farm which is near that break was still generating (for another 2 seconds!) The other two stations close to that break (#2) are Bluff and North Brown Hill, which were already shut down (and for 6 long seconds).
The best friend of renewables in Australia is left to lamely call on what the report doesn’t say.
The report does not say why this happened, or why they stopped generating. It could be because they had nowhere to send their output. Or that, as mentioned earlier, some were hit by lightning, or tripped after repeated voltage drops.
Nor does the report does not say if the total blackout would avoided by having a brown coal generator on line, or if the outcome would have been any different with no wind power.
The report also point to problems with conventional generation, saying that contracted but un-named providers of “black start” services – peaking gas fired and diesel power stations – failed to deliver and could not be used to restart the main gas generator, meaning the operator had to wait until a new link was established with Victoria.
Frequency hell
To give you some idea of how important frequency is and how fast it falls over, here’s a couple of paragraphs from the AEMO report. At the Heywood interconnector, the extreme frequency limits appear to be 4Hz for a “quarter of a second”:
Generator performance standards after 2007 require generating units to remain on line for a Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF) of 1 Hz/second for 1 second as a minimum, and up to 4 Hz/second for 0.25 seconds. RoCoF must be maintained within this limit to prevent damage to generating units and effective operation of protection relays and emergency control schemes such as the automatic Under Frequency Load Shedding (UFLS) scheme.
The sudden loss of around 850–900 MW of supply to SA due to the tripping of the Heywood Interconnector resulting in a rapid reduction in the power system frequency.7 AEMO analysis has identified that the RoCoF was between 6 and 7 Hz per second. Consequently, UFLS was not able to arrest the frequency decline and as a result the frequency fell to zero. Note that generating units are unable to operate (and are not required to do so) where frequency is below 47 Hz. With the frequency below 47 Hz, generating units subsequently tripped off line resulting in the SA region Black System.
This is the real story of dire problems with a wind dominated grid. Even if it was transmission towers that crashed the system, and even if the auto-shut-off stupidity could be managed away, that still leaves the grid very fragile because of the frequency dilemma. A stable grid needs “synchronous inertia” — big reliable turbines that drive at near constant speeds. Coal turbines are 600 tons and spin at 3000 rpm. That’s inertia.
What of the other 19 transmission towers?
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9.5 out of 10 based on 124 ratings
 …. Pierre Gosselin reports that environmental experts, professors, and some green leaders in Germany are fed up at the deforestation, the fraud and the futility. They are protesting at the waste of money in the name of ecology as trees and birds get destroyed, electricity prices skyrocket, but nothing gets achieved for the climate. One has put together a book titled: “Sacrificed Landscapes – How the Energiewende Is Destroying our Landscapes.”
They might mistakenly think there is a man-made crisis in the climate but they are honest players, and they realize that real environmental causes are being used as a guise for a planned economy and self serving corruption:
Now that Germany’s Energiewende has been in full swing for a number of years, many leading environmentalists are in a state of shock as huge areas of the country are being deforested and landscapes disfigured to make way for hundreds of wind turbines.
Environmentalist Georg Etscheit is a regular contributor at Germany’s leading climate alarmism site, Klimaretter, and he as well, has had enough. Etscheit will be releasing a book in early November.
 Wind farms dominate the landscape in Germany. From the promotional video. The book contains many quotes:
Jörg Rehmann, journalist and author:
If we want to survive on this planet, we need an Energiewende. But what the policymakers have made of it is not an Energiewende, rather it is the greatest fraud project since the end of the second world war.”
Prof. Dr. Niko Paech, later adds:
Science is legitimizing a rampage against nature. We destroy the landscape while we claim it is serving the ecology. It’s a cannibalism by the measures. Climate protection is the aim that justifies the means to destroy all other remaining environmental media.”
There is a lot more: No Tricks Zone
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9.7 out of 10 based on 102 ratings
Look who “signed up” to the Cabaret called the Paris Agreement?
… India is doubling its coal use by 2020 and tripling its emissions by 2030. That’s what “going green” means.
India has ratified the weakest kind of non-reduction, just a promise it will try to “cut emissions intensity“. That big goal is to increase its carbon emissions by slightly less than the rate its population is growing at. An achievement most countries do just by being there. It’s the default condition as economies develop. Instead of reducing emissions, India is set to increase its total emissions threefold by 2030. Ratify that, eh?
Though even that pitifully weak anti-goal is not enforceable. Nearly everything in the Paris deal is optional, voluntary, and written as a should, not a shall. After ten months of delays and frivolous ambit claims like trying to get entry to the nuclear club (and access to more uranium), India has finally signed up for Paris anyway. Which is signing nothing much — all India has agreed to is to submit a new goal for itself every five years, and do a stocktake. It’s that banal.
As I’ve said before, there are so many reasons for developing countries to want to join the cast:
Figure how the Paris equation looks to China or India:
- how can we hobble competitors, get their factories, and help sell more goods?
- how can we collect more of pointless guilt payments (carbon credits etc)?
- as a bonus we like to get thanked and look like heroes. :- )
To get all three: smile at the press conference, and pander to the Global Worriers in words only. Do token efforts and turn the guilt screws on the West as appropriate.
The Paris agreement is a Grand Theater designed to convince western taxpayers to cough up more money. China and India are part of the show, putting on their best environmental faces while they do nothing green, or even less.
Remember December 2015: India is going to double coal output and the Paris climate deal won’t affect that.
India still plans to double coal output by 2020 and rely on the resource for decades afterwards, a senior official said on Monday, days after rich and poor countries agreed in Paris to curb carbon emissions that cause global warming.
India, the world’s third-largest carbon emitter, is dependent on coal for about two-thirds of its energy needs and has pledged to mine more of the fuel to power its resource-hungry economy while also promising to increase clean energy generation.
Oren Cass felt China was doing too little, and India was even worse:
India, meanwhile, managed to lower the bar even further, submitting a report with no promise of emissions ever peaking or declining and only a 33-35 percent reduction in emissions per unit of GDP over the 2005-2030 period. Given India’s recent rate of improving energy efficiency, this actually implies a slower rate of improvement over the next 15 years. In its INDC, India nevertheless estimates it will need $2.5 trillion in support to implement its unserious plan.
— Why the Paris deal is meaningless
The best analysis came from Paul Homewood:
What does this all mean, when we take away the smoke and the mirrors. The following points stand out:
- No actual CO2 target has been set.
- Although the talk is of “increase the share of clean energy in its total energy mix by as much as 40%”, when you get down to the small print, as we will shortly, the commitment is only to 40% of capacity, and not generation. As we know, renewables give very poor utilisation, so the amount generated will be much, much less than 40%.
- Also, this 40% is not of its total energy mix, as reported, but only of electricity mix.
- Commitment is given about reducing carbon intensity of GDP, but nearly half of this has already been achieved since 2005. As we have seen with China, maturing economies tend to grow away from energy intensive industries.
Homewood calculates that if India sticks to its INDC (Intended Nationally Determined Contribution) and cuts its emissions intensity by 19% as promised, allowing for current population growth, its emissions will still grow from 2100Mt in 2014 to 6300Mt by 2030.
Last October India were asking for $166b a year to achieve this. I wonder what they got?
Extra reading — how the US and China “ratifications” are just as meaningless: Emergency Theater for Paris Agreement: China, US rush to sham ratification.
Tell the obedient Anglosphere nations, not to pay, not to play — the Paris agreement is an act.
Big emitters would like to be seen,
By alarmists as having turned clean,
For which they don’t care,
Just to gain market share,
And profit from anything Green.
— Ruairi
9.7 out of 10 based on 83 ratings
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7.5 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
It is not surprising there are floods all over the East coast at the moment
September brought 500% of normal rain to 2 million square kilometers of Eastern and Northern Australia. There are floods across the South East. There are flood alerts in South Australia, floods have been washing through NSW (and some of those floods were caused by a dam release). There are floods in Tasmania. Flood watches are active in Victoria. Spare a thought for farmers who are taking big losses from both frost and flood in Australia. (So much for endless droughts, and early springs. Hello, Tim Flannery.) Heavy snow has also fallen — 25cm in Threadbo (it so late in the season, some ski lifts have stopped operating). Right now, thousands of people still don’t have power in South Australia, while others are being rescued from floods across SA and NSW. Floods have stranded 181 families for month on islands in the middle of NSW.
h/t to Warwick Hughes, and Lance Pidgeon
A large part of the scary purple area got only 100-200mm of rain in a month (4-8 inches). It’s just very unusual in these dry areas.
To give you some idea, it has been the wettest September on record for Eastern Australia, coming on top of a one of our wettest two winters. Variability is the norm.
Flood news — The Australian
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8.8 out of 10 based on 76 ratings
In the last 120 years in Perth there has never been a September as cold as this one. We know that thanks to Chris Gillham, who has been tracking Western Australian weather in detail for years at WAClimate.net.
The headline in The West Australian today was Perth shivers through it’s coldest ever September. For some reason (I can’t think why) the extreme weather journalists did not mention climate change (has that ever happened on a hottest ever record story?). It’s so unusually cold here that wheat farmers, only weeks away from harvest*, are struggling with frost damage on crops. They are making snowmen from the frosts. It is supposed to be rapidly heating up but it is three degrees below normal.
Given the freak weather, Will Steffen immediately announced that “This is a prelude to a disturbing future. And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t address climate change.” No. Wait. Scratch that. That was South Australia, where one bad storm was caused by coal fired electrons. A record cold month is just weather.
Curiously, The Bureau of Meteorology(BOM) announced it was the coldest ever September for Perth since 1994 when records started at Mt Lawley, and the coldest at Perth Airport since records started there in 1944. But it took an unpaid data-aficionado to discover that it was actually the coldest since 1897 at the Perth Regional Office (see the “grains of salt” about this at the end of the post). And that applies to the super-spiffy-adjusted ACORN dataset which goes back to 1910. A coldest “ever” record.
Chris Gillham writes that “This September wasn’t just a bit cold in Perth. It was very cold compared to almost all Septembers ever recorded in Stevensons.” The mean was a record because of the unusually cool minima, not the maxima. Perth Airport’s coldest September since 1944 smashed the previous mean temp record of 1968 by 0.73C and, even with cooling adjustments since 1910, this September in ACORN was 0.48C colder than the previous homogenised record in 1919.
By the way, I note tomorrow there is a severe weather warning in SW WA with gusts of up to 125 km per hour. This is a Category 4 Grid Destroying Gust. Hope and pray that we still have electricity tomorrow. 😉 A million square kilometers of cooler ocean
Chris Gillham points out there’s a big cold blob in the ocean around South and West Australia that just might have something to do with the cold weather. (See the sea-surface temperature maps below).
The Great Southern Cold blob may also have something to do with those South Australian storms.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 88 ratings
Australians are going to be talking about this for weeks. Indeed, the SA Blackout is the stuff of legend.
The Greens are blaming coal (what else?) for causing bad storms and blackouts. Forget that Queensland gets hit with cyclones all the time and the whole state grid doesn’t break. Some greenies are also raging against “the politicization” of the storms. Yes, Indeedy. Go tell that to Will Steffen.
We are not being told the whole story. We do know that South Australia has the highest emphasis on renewables in the world. It also has a fragile electricity network, and wild price spikes to boot. (Coincidence?) The death of a few transmission towers should not knock out a whole state, nor should it take so long to recover from. The storm struck worst north of Adelaide near Port Augusta but the juicy interconnector from Victoria runs in from the south, and goes right up past Adelaide and most of the population. Why couldn’t the broken parts of the system be isolated?
Digging around I find ominous warnings that while the lightning and winds probably caused the blackout, the state of the South Australian grid appeared to be teetering on the brink, without enough reserve, or without well planned protection mechanisms to cope with an inherently unstable system. The excess of wind power made the system more fragile, and also made it harder to restore. There appear to be three reasons (at least) that excessive wind power is less fun, more costly, and golly, but if windmills don’t stop storms, why buy those expensive electrons?
1. Wind power adds instability of the system — not only does it ramp up and down frequently on an hourly scale, but it’s harder to mesh at the cycles per second scale too. This is about maintaining the “frequency” of the system (in Australia’s case thats 50Hz). Windpower is a type of energy that doesn’t easily synchronize with the 50Hz frequency (or any stable frequency). Other generators that have turbines that spin at regular speeds do (coal, gas, biomass, and hydro). They are easy to synchronize.
The frequency thing is critical — think of AC — Alternating Current — as being a push-pull of electrons 50 times a second. If any source of electricity joins the grid out of phase or at any other frequency, like say 49*, the waves of electrons are going to get out of synch fairly quickly. And we’d get horrible interference patterns of spikes and dips. This is a point where systems have to shut down (in seconds) to protect everything. This is an intrinsic design vulnerability in a system which prioritizes renewables over “thermal” energy.
*UPDATE: Thanks to Tomomason and Analytik and some great comments below, I now know that the frequency varies a little as load and supply ebb from 49.85 – 50.15 (See also the subthread by co2isnotevil at #5). These tiny variations are used as feedback for plant operators to adjust their operation. Read both subthreads for more information. This is why the whole grid is so much more stable with a dominant supply from synchronous turbines (ie thermal, biomass or hydro).
2. Wind power can’t be used to reboot the system and SA was getting warnings about that too.
Commenter Andrew W at WattClarity:
” the ElectraNet boss on radio this morning mentioned that wind generated electricity cannot be used for ‘black start’ processes, that they need to get full control of load and frequency before introducing wind..“
To do a Black Start (cranking up the whole grid from nothing) we need hydro, or thermal, but wind power is not much use. InDaily reports that not only is wind not much use, but that SA electricity wasn’t prepared with extra fuel at the gas generators. (It’s amazing they got things running again at all really!)
[InDaily] A report on South Australia’s electricity system, published by AEMO last month, warned that there was a limited capacity to reboot the state’s electricity system in the event of a total blackout.
“There is a limited pool of strategically-located SRAS (system restart ancillary services) in South Australia to meet the current standard,” the report says.
“This indicates reliance on a single fuel source for all generation involved in the system restoration process in South Australia.
“Many of these gas-powered generating units do not have dedicated fuel storage facilities, exposing South Australia to further risk if there was a gas supply interruption during system restoration.”
3. Wind Turbines shut suddenly at high speeds. There is a possibility that a sudden shut down can happen when turbines are going full tilt in storm force winds hit “danger limits”:
This is speculative — There are suggestions that a lot of wind turbines were powered up at “high-wind, storm-velocity” levels and were generating high wattages when they reached their shut down limits and suddenly switched off. That would cause a major drop in the system. This type of failure would belong in the “census” night silly management category. Surely it could not be so? Surely, also, this could be overcome if wind turbines were shut in a staged sequence when known high wind incidents were coming. I want more data.
StopTheseThings explains both the first and third problems: Another Statewide Blackout: South Australia’s Wind Power Disaster Continues. The post on WattClarity supports the first one with a lot of detail. No hint of the third though. Both sites were very useful. The commenters too.
What wind-turbines poorly produce,
Is unstable, unsound and diffuse,
As they can’t meet demand,
Or high winds withstand,
They’re pointless, defunct and no use.
–Ruairi
An Unstable System
StopThese Things tells us that they hear that SA grid managers are running the system at 220V, not 230V (like the rest of Australia) in order to cope with the fluxes from wind power. It would be good to get confirmation of that. In November 2015 after a large blackout in South Australia, StopTheseThings predicted that after the coal plant was shut in April 2016, there would be statewide blackouts:
It’s also to be borne in mind that these 110,000 homes and businesses were plunged into darkness at a time when SA’s Northern and Playford coal-fired plants at Port Augusta (with a combined capacity of 784 MW) were still happily chugging away.
The owner of Port Augusta’s plants, Alinta has already signalled that it will close them in April 2016, due to the market distortions caused by the massive subsidies to wind power set up under the Large-Scale RET. If it does, South Australians can expect statewide blackouts with the kind of regularity that you’d be hard pressed to find outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
There was an August warning from AEMO that SA can’t cope with “contingencies”:
An ominous hint here on August 10th from the AEMO, reported on a dedicated electricity blog WattClarity. At the time SA faced a different threat (a planned outage in a Victorian supply). The AEMO was warning that SA doesn’t have enough local supplies to cope with any interruption:
“Another day where LOR2 notice issued for SA – what does it mean?”
[Paul McArdle August 10th] In shorthand, this means that if something happens (like the critical imports from Victoria tripping – a low probability event, but still a credible one, and so one AEMO needs to plan for) then South Australia would not have enough local supplies that could be dispatched in time to keep the SA system stable, so portion of SA load would be turned off (i.e. some lights would go out) to keep the broader system in South Australia online.
To sum up my understanding of some of the factors:
1) Plenty of wind in South Australia currently, making it uneconomic to run much thermal plant currently (especially with today’s gas price still $7.89/GJ at the Adelaide hub);
2) This is especially the case as the Heywood link constrained to flow west currently (i.e. South Australia can’t export its “economically surplus” wind), driving prices in South Australia lower;
3) Not much thermal plant running, so not as much capability to ramp up production in South Australia if needed, hence the LOR2 notice.
Paul McArdle goes on to point out (or quote someone, it’s not clear) that the AEMO arranged to pay some providers to carry spare capacity in case of a contingency:
My layman’s explanation of “Raise Regulation” FCAS is that it has to do with some generators agreeing with AEMO (in return for some small compensation) to keep a bit of “spare” capacity in reserve (i.e. not have it dispatched in the energy market), ready to give the system a (very quick) extra kick should the system suddenly slow below 3000rpm. This (frequency drop) would be what would happen in South Australia at these points in time shown if:
(a) the interconnector was to trip or
(b) some generator (wind, or gas) in SA was to trip.
Looks like we got (a) and (b).
So South Australia was already running a riskier system, with warnings that an incident could push the system over.
From WattClarity – a video on the complex South Australian situation unfolding on Wednesday.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 129 ratings
South Australia, population 1.7 million, has no electricity
A storm hit, possibly the worst for 50 years. Winds of 90km/hr gusting to 140km/hr. Reports are that everyone is being told to use their radio’s and stay off the streets. The blackout struck at 4.30pm AEST. UPDATE: Power is coming back to some, but questions are being asked about the state which has more renewable energy than any other in the world. See updates below. It sure looks like a management disaster. Want to build subs by torchlight?
How long before someone blames climate change?
—————–
9:55pm “Storms like the one which knocked out the entire South Australian electricity network are occurring in a warmer and wetter atmosphere, the Climate Council’s Professor Will Steffen said. “These conditions, driven by climate change, are likely increasing the intensity of storms like the one in South Australia,” he said. “Australians are being affected right now by climate change. “The atmosphere is packing much more energy than 70 years ago… This is a prelude to a disturbing future.
Nevermind that there was a worse storm 50 years ago. What was that a prelude too, Will? Fifty years of better weather.
Witchdoctors have no shame.
——————-
UPDATE #2: Is it due to the high reliance on renewables
The premier says “No” (not surprisingly)
But others say the reliance on renewables has made the network more complex and less reliable: h/t GWPF:
South Australia pays the price for heavy reliance on renewable energy
Wednesday’s event will trigger renewed debate over the state’s heavy reliance on renewable energy which has forced the closure of uncompetitive power stations, putting the electricity network in South Australia under stress.
Earlier this week, the Grattan Institute warned that South Australia’s high reliance on renewable energy sources left it exposed to disruptions. It pointed to the fact that while the renewable energy target had encouraged the development of wind and solar generation, it had the potential to undermine supply security at a reasonable price, because it forced the closure of inefficient power stations without encouraging the construction of the necessary new generation supply sources.
These issues are different to those South Australia is battling at the moment. But the increasing complexity of electricity networks, which are dealing with a more diverse location of power generators such as wind farms in remote locations rather than a small number of big power stations, means that at times of stress such as extreme storms which occurred in the state on Wednesday, outages can take longer to resolve .
South Australia relies more heavily on renewable power than any other region in the developed world.
It wouldn’t have helped that wind turbines are usually turned off during high winds.
More UPDATES posted below.
Power is out across the entire state of South Australia after fierce storms triggered widespread blackouts.
It is believed lightning bolt struck a transmitter around 3.50pm ACST, which caused the entire network to crash.
Watch a special bulletin…(at the link above. Flights full of passengers arriving were stuck at the airport unable to desembark. People caught in lifts. All trains stopped.)
Skynews
A spokesperson for SA Power Networks says the interconnector did not cause the power outage rather the system has shut down as a response to protect customer safety.
The good news is that when SA blew they didn’t have to shut down the rest of the Eastern States. I guess no one was worried about customer safety in the rest of the national grid.
The best stories about this will come out tomorrow when the people who are off line now get hooked in. We just hope their day is not to bad.
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8.7 out of 10 based on 105 ratings
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