Wind energy not to blame for South Australia power outage

When rolling blackouts occurred for some consumers in South Australia late in the evening of November 1 last year, the fossil fuel industry, the nuclear lobby, conservatives and many in the mainstream media were quick to point the finger at wind energy, in particular, and renewable energy in general.

Andrew Bolt, the right-wing, climate denying News Corp commentator, declared “wind don’t blow, South Australia don’t glow” and proceeded to blame the outage on wind energy “because wind power did not supply energy because it often does not start until 3am.”

His comments were followed by similar remarks by a collection of analysts, fossil fuel lobbyists, and nuclear advocates, and by stories in the local press and TV that sought to demonise renewable energy. Anti-wind blogs, favoured by many Coalition politicians, chimed in:

It became clear quite quickly that wind energy was not the culprit. And a full report released by the Australian Energy Market Operator last week confirms this, saying that the problem lay elsewhere.

The outage itself was caused by a faulty signal that caused the line linking South Australia to the rest of the grid to trip and then disconnect.

Then, as the operator tried to re-connect power, the actions of a gas-fired generator which ignored instructions to alter its output caused frequency levels to surge, and for the blackout to last nearly four times longer than it should have.

The scare campaign against wind and solar is reaching almost hysterical proportions in South Australia, and from vested interests in other states keen to slow down the roll out of renewable energy across the nation.

Not only are the renewables being blamed for blackouts, they are also being accused of causing huge price spikes in the market for frequency controls, which makes sure the grid is stable.

But another report, this time from the Australian Energy Regulator, criticises the actions of the market operator, and the bidding patterns of coal- and gas-fired generators, for the huge price spikes that caused a minor scandal, and $20 million of possibly unnecessary market costs, in October last year.

First to the blackout.

On Sunday, November 21, one of the two lines that links South Australian to Victoria was out for maintenance, when at 21:56 the second line “tripped” because of a faulty signal. It was blamed on “non-compatible protection relay configuration” that had been recently installed as part of an upgrade. It was probably human error.

This “trip” caused the the South Australian grid to be “islanded.” This should be a routine situation. 160MW of capacity was shed to deal with frequency issues, and under normal circumstances the power should have been re-established quickly, in less than 10 minutes.

However, the local network could not solve its frequency problems as it expected, but not because of too much or too little wind energy.

First, frequency levels were affected by a rise in output from “non scheduled” generators that lifted frequency levels – most likely co-generators and diesel gensets. Then, the situation was made much worse when the large Torrens Island gas generator ignored requests from the market operator to cut down its output. Instead, it kept raising it, by 65MW all told.

This pushed the frequency level above 50.58 Hertz, outside the normal frequency band, which meant that the South Australia grid was insecure and could not be synchronised with the main grid.

The result, says AEMO, was that instead of power from the inter-connector being restored within 9 minutes, it took an extra 26 minutes for the frequency control problems to be resolved and the link restored.