Victorian networks blow a fuse in heatwave – Coalition blows its mind on Twitter

Conservatives love a summer blackout. And with two-thirds of peak blackout season already gone, they were not going to miss the opportunity presented by last night’s outages across Victoria to point the finger at renewable energy, the state Labor government’s support of renewables, and most of all last year’s closure of the privately owned Hazelwood coal-fired power plant.

The only slight hitch in this ingenious plan is that none of the above had anything at all to do with it.

On Sunday, the state reached record grid demand for a Sunday in the midst of the heatwave, but around 55,000 Victorians suffered without power at various times on Sunday evening – and many continue to do so on Monday – after faults across the state’s distribution networks.

As explained by the Energy Networks Association, the assorted network companies, and the Australian Energy Market Operator, the blackouts were caused by faults in the *delivery* of the electricity – and not the *supply* or generation of it.

That is, as absolutely everyone in the state turned their air conditioners up to 11 to cope with temperatures hovering around 40°C – and an overnight low of around 30°C – the state’s “poles and wires” (mostly substation fuses) systems were overwhelmed by demand that peaked at around 9,144MW: “the highest operational demand for a Sunday, ever,” says AEMO.

United Energy, Powercor and CitiPower spokeswoman Emma Tyner said “the prolonged high temperatures and humidity through the weekend significantly increased electricity demand at many locations across the network which resulted in multiple power outages,” she said.

“In most cases, substation fuse faults were the main cause of the outages.”

AusNet spokesman Hugo Armstrong said: ”There are a lot fuses blowing in the hot weather and a significant power pull with people having put in air-conditioners they didn’t tell us about.”

So to summarise, the outages had nothing to do with insufficient power being generated, by renewables or otherwise.

The state’s remaining coal plants did not go missing in the heat, as they have done so often before; and the state’s rooftop solar capacity – as illustrated in Dylan McConnell’s chart below – helped to push the day’s peak out to 7.30pm, quite probably ensuring Victorians did not endure an even longer, more painful blackout.

As AEMO noted, even when power demand reached its record peak on Sunday, there was still plenty of power in the market operator’s reserves – 1,384MW (not including the strategic RERT reserve). They just couldn’t deliver it to everyone, because of the unforeseen distribution faults.

But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good smear campaign?

While the government and AEMO turned their focus to the electricity companies who appear to have – at great expense to consumers – gold-plated all but certain key parts of their distribution networks, state and federal Coalition members got busy making things up.

Even our deputy PM, and chief coal power industry propper-upper, Barbaby Joyce couldn’t resist weighing in. He’s only human, after all.

Thankfully, there are plenty of people on Twitter who know quite a bit about how the national electricity market works, and were able to set the record straight. Here are some of the best Tweets doing just that:

State energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio also had some things to say on Twitter. First, quite calmly…

…and then a bit more pointedly:

And finally…