South Australian Exeriment - the blackout, now legal action.

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Shannow

Shannow

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Wondering if I'll get any apologies for the threads a few years ago...

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...perators-court-south-australian-blackout

Quote
Australia's energy regulator has launched court action against four windfarm operators, alleging they failed to meet performance requirements during 2016's statewide South Australian blackout.

About 850,000 homes lost power on 28 September that year, when severe weather conditions led to significant damage to SA transmission lines, causing voltage disturbances. The event heightened a fractious national debate about energy policy.

The Australian Energy Regulator has said a loss of wind generation after the voltage disturbances contributed to the the blackout.

It alleges subsidiaries of the four companies - AGL Energy, Neoen SA, Pacific Hydro and Tilt Renewables - failed to ensure their windfarms complied with a generator performance standard requirement and had automatic protection systems to ensure continuity of supply.
 
Blackouts (are we allowed to say that here ?) were government policy in NZ back in the '70's. To save power street lights and all advertising lights were turned off. It was fun, driving (riding) around the city like it was out in the country. They wouldn't dare do that now, we have a couple of generations who couldn't cope with darkness at night.
 
It's early morning here so my mind is still foggy.

The wind blew down some main transmission lines so the wind farms tripped off line thus causing the blackout?

The bigger question though is was the public sold a bill of goods on the system?
 
Sounds to me like the Heywood interconnector surge was to blame for the blackout, or perhaps the tornados. Too bad that everything has devolved into a blame game rather than a cooperative effort to fix things. AND that it has dragged on this long, wasting time, money and effort.

Shannow I don't know what the apologies would be for, care to enlighten?
 
Originally Posted by JLTD
Sounds to me like the Heywood interconnector surge was to blame for the blackout, or perhaps the tornados. Too bad that everything has devolved into a blame game rather than a cooperative effort to fix things. AND that it has dragged on this long, wasting time, money and effort.

Shannow I don't know what the apologies would be for, care to enlighten?


My understanding of the situation was that the high winds blew past the threshold for cut out on the wind turbines, causing them to put the brakes on and cease generation. This was compounded by the downed poles that removed some of the generators from being available. This triggered a massive overdraw over the interconnect, which caused it to trip.

It was a cascading failure. Insufficient idle stand-in capacity was available to counter the sudden and massive loss of generation from the wind farms putting on the brakes, thus the overloading of the interconnect.

SA lacked (lacks?) insufficient firm capacity and thus there is an over-reliance on the interconnect to balance the variability of the wind and solar installs.
 
What do they do , if the wind is not blowing ? I seem to be missing something or the information is incomplete ?
 
You build in enough peaking/base load generation to handle the loss of the wind/hydro/solar power supply. Here in the states it is natural gas that is used when the wind don't blow. the sun don't shine and the rain don't fall. Thermal coal still can account for up to half the base load even now.
 
Originally Posted by WyrTwister
What do they do , if the wind is not blowing ? I seem to be missing something or the information is incomplete ?


They burn gas and import power. When the wind is blowing, they export power.

Current situation in SA:
[Linked Image]


22 hours ago:
[Linked Image]
 
Originally Posted by sloinker
You build in enough peaking/base load generation to handle the loss of the wind/hydro/solar power supply. Here in the states it is natural gas that is used when the wind don't blow. the sun don't shine and the rain don't fall. Thermal coal still can account for up to half the base load even now.


That's the problem with the South Australian Experiment, they HAD enough capacity...and lost it through being forced out economically by renewables, which in spite (or because of) their intermittency push the prices -ve...

Nobody is building support for these...it's all closing down.
 
Originally Posted by JLTD
Sounds to me like the Heywood interconnector surge was to blame for the blackout, or perhaps the tornados. Too bad that everything has devolved into a blame game rather than a cooperative effort to fix things. AND that it has dragged on this long, wasting time, money and effort.

Shannow I don't know what the apologies would be for, care to enlighten?


Generators connected to the grid are supposed to handle surges and things in the system, e.g. one phase to ground for so many seconds, system frequency high and low, voltage changes etc.

The market regulator is arguing that these plants should have "ridden through" the disturbances, rather than crashing and exaccerbating the problem.

Back when I happened, there were various accusations that my analysis was fueled by "buggy whipping", and the fact that I am in the thermal industry.

.

"Look at the towers that blew down...clearly the wind farms aren't the cause"...well the regulator thinks they were, and that they have a case.

Note that new wind developments need to have things like synchronos condensers, and storage to provide "synthetic inertia", and a virtual governor....the masses of wind that went in early were just plugged in, without providing all of the required services for "automatic connection".
 
Originally Posted by Shannow
Originally Posted by sloinker
You build in enough peaking/base load generation to handle the loss of the wind/hydro/solar power supply. Here in the states it is natural gas that is used when the wind don't blow. the sun don't shine and the rain don't fall. Thermal coal still can account for up to half the base load even now.


That's the problem with the South Australian Experiment, they HAD enough capacity...and lost it through being forced out economically by renewables, which in spite (or because of) their intermittency push the prices -ve...

Nobody is building support for these...it's all closing down.



Why would any person remove a redundancy for a lifesaving service like electricity? Anyone with a half functioning lobe knows wind is a moving target and can not guarantee minimal power generation.
 
Shannow thanks for the illumination. Seems pretty simple to me - the wind turbines could have stayed on and been destroyed, or shut down for safety as they did. It was a risk either way but I'll take a blackout over a (insert time period here required for repairs) loss of generating capability.
 
Originally Posted by JLTD
Shannow thanks for the illumination. Seems pretty simple to me - the wind turbines could have stayed on and been destroyed, or shut down for safety as they did. It was a risk either way but I'll take a blackout over a (insert time period here required for repairs) loss of generating capability.


No, that's not the case...all connected generators are to ride out a certain even for a certain period of time...e..g. under frequency of 47.5Hz (IIRC) for 5 minutes, then you have the right to trip to protect the machine.

These machines, the one in question and subject to the regulatory action did not stay in when they were required to...it wasn't that they were going to be destroyed, they had to ride through the system events for long enough that protection systems would have blacked out sections of the state...they didn't and took the state out with it.

The regulator has ascertained that they "abandoned ship" early, forcing a blackout when they should have (per their contract to the market) stayed safely in service unles the contracted system controls were inadequate.
 
Coming here real soon. NM has many wind farms which shut down as soon as the wind really blows. High demand we have phase dropping, brown out and power drop roulette. Back up is almost a requirement, all in the name of Green. Doesn't make sense to old guys like me.
Smoky
 
Originally Posted by BMWTurboDzl
Originally Posted by PimTac
What happened to the Tesla battery backup that was so touted by the enviros?


Utility scale storage has a long way to go.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40072


The chart says that there are plans to increase battery backup power capacity to 2500 MW by 2023, but nowhere in the webpage does it say anything about how long the 2500 MW output can be maintained. Is it one second or one day? Actual energy storage capacity has to be stated in MW*hrs to provide an indication of how long the power output can be maintained. In the case of load-leveling renewables such as wind and solar, there should be a standard for storage to carry the system through periods of no sun or no wind. Can you imagine how much that would make the cost of electric storage batteries increase? You'd have to take out a second mortgage on your house to buy a replacement battery for your car because utility companies would be sucking up all the production.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted by A_Harman
Originally Posted by BMWTurboDzl
Originally Posted by PimTac
What happened to the Tesla battery backup that was so touted by the enviros?


Utility scale storage has a long way to go.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40072


The chart says that there are plans to increase battery backup power capacity to 2500 MW by 2023, but nowhere in the webpage does it say anything about how long the 2500 MW output can be maintained. Is it one second or one day? Actual energy storage capacity has to be stated in MW*hrs to provide an indication of how long the power output can be maintained. In the case of load-leveling renewables such as wind and solar, there should be a standard for storage to carry the system through periods of no sun or no wind. Can you imagine how much that would make the cost of electric storage batteries increase? You'd have to take out a second mortgage on your house to buy a replacement battery for your car because utility companies would be sucking up all the production.


Yep, exactly. This is 15 days of Ontario wind turbine performance:
[Linked Image]


The number of MWh of storage and over-build necessary to firm this to the ~4,500MW installed capacity figure (nameplate)? If we look at the average, it's 605MW for this period. So, to average 4,500MW we'd need 33,500MW of wind turbines, which is obviously not viable. So, what do you do, double the installed capacity? No, because there were only two periods where a doubling of capacity would have pushed us over our 4,500MW threshold and thus given excess capacity to charge storage. Tripling it still wouldn't get us there. If we see how many times it hit ~1,000MW it's likely frequent enough that if we went for 5x the current installed capacity, which would be 22,500MW, that we'd have enough capacity beyond 4,500MW frequently enough to charge a storage medium to fill the lulls.

Then there's the size of the storage medium! So, there are numerous instances where output was below 50MW, but if we bump that up to periods below 200MW we can see that this is quite frequent; frequent enough to be likely our benchmark. So, we'll need 4,500MW of battery capacity for when output hits zero, which it does. And it would need to be able to satisfy a 3,500MW deficit for extended periods, which is where we are at when we take our 200MW benchmark and multiply it by our 5-fold increase in installed capacity. If we look at Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and then Monday, we see that significant capacity buggers off at about 9AM on Thursday, a small amount returns briefly around 5:00PM, dropping back to ~200MW at 2AM Friday where it eventually slides into the double digits. Capacity doesn't start coming back until noon on Monday. So, we are looking at ~90 hours of storage required to firm that period with a 4,500MW storage medium, which would need to store 405,000MWh.

To put some perspective on this, the Aussie "big battery" has an installed capacity of 100MW with a storage capacity of 129MWh and it cost $50 million dollars. We would need 3,140 Tesla "Big batteries" to match our storage capacity that we determined above, which would cost $157 billion dollars (AUD), or 6x the cost of the two new AP1000 reactors at Vogtle, which will provide 2,234MW of constant power. And this is on top of increasing the wind farm capacity 5x. And all of this stuff has a 10-20 year lifespan
crazy2.gif
 
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Originally Posted by A_Harman
Originally Posted by BMWTurboDzl
Originally Posted by PimTac
What happened to the Tesla battery backup that was so touted by the enviros?


Utility scale storage has a long way to go.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40072


The chart says that there are plans to increase battery backup power capacity to 2500 MW by 2023, but nowhere in the webpage does it say anything about how long the 2500 MW output can be maintained. Is it one second or one day? Actual energy storage capacity has to be stated in MW*hrs to provide an indication of how long the power output can be maintained. In the case of load-leveling renewables such as wind and solar, there should be a standard for storage to carry the system through periods of no sun or no wind. Can you imagine how much that would make the cost of electric storage batteries increase? You'd have to take out a second mortgage on your house to buy a replacement battery for your car because utility companies would be sucking up all the production.


Yep, exactly. This is 15 days of Ontario wind turbine performance:
[Linked Image]


The number of MWh of storage and over-build necessary to firm this to the ~4,500MW installed capacity figure (nameplate)? If we look at the average, it's 605MW for this period. So, to average 4,500MW we'd need 33,500MW of wind turbines, which is obviously not viable. So, what do you do, double the installed capacity? No, because there were only two periods where a doubling of capacity would have pushed us over our 4,500MW threshold and thus given excess capacity to charge storage. Tripling it still wouldn't get us there. If we see how many times it hit ~1,000MW it's likely frequent enough that if we went for 5x the current installed capacity, which would be 22,500MW, that we'd have enough capacity beyond 4,500MW frequently enough to charge a storage medium to fill the lulls.

Then there's the size of the storage medium! So, there are numerous instances where output was below 50MW, but if we bump that up to periods below 200MW we can see that this is quite frequent; frequent enough to be likely our benchmark. So, we'll need 4,500MW of battery capacity for when output hits zero, which it does. And it would need to be able to satisfy a 3,500MW deficit for extended periods, which is where we are at when we take our 200MW benchmark and multiply it by our 5-fold increase in installed capacity. If we look at Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and then Monday, we see that significant capacity buggers off at about 9AM on Thursday, a small amount returns briefly around 5:00PM, dropping back to ~200MW at 2AM Friday where it eventually slides into the double digits. Capacity doesn't start coming back until noon on Monday. So, we are looking at ~90 hours of storage required to firm that period with a 4,500MW storage medium, which would need to store 405,000MWh.

To put some perspective on this, the Aussie "big battery" has an installed capacity of 100MW with a storage capacity of 129MWh and it cost $50 million dollars. We would need 3,140 Tesla "Big batteries" to match our storage capacity that we determined above, which would cost $157 billion dollars (AUD), or 6x the cost of the two new AP1000 reactors at Vogtle, which will provide 2,234MW of constant power. And this is on top of increasing the wind farm capacity 5x. And all of this stuff has a 10-20 year lifespan
crazy2.gif



That's mind-boggling. And to think that the Tesla Big Batteries contain large amounts of Cobalt and Nickel, which are strategic metals and therefore not cheap. Of course Tesla has to push Li-ion, which is what they put in their cars, but high energy-density batteries are not required for static applications. Lead-acid would be more economical even though they would take up more space.
 
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