From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Wild weather has pushed the Aussie State of Victoria’s fragile grid beyond breaking point during the last few days. The last thing Victoria needs is senior academics pushing non-solutions.

A major blackout left 500,000 Victorian homes without power – but it shows our energy system is resilient

Published: February 14, 2024 8.10am AEDT
Roger Dargaville
Director Monash Energy Institute, Monash University

Half a million homes and businesses in Victoria were left without power late on Tuesday following a major power outage. The disruption occurred when severe winds knocked over several high-voltage electricity transmission towers, causing all four units of the Loy Yang A coal-fired power station to trip and go offline.

Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio described the blackout as “one of the largest outage events in the state’s history”. 

The event has prompted questions about the reliability of the state’s electricity grid. But it’s important to note these extreme winds would have seriously disrupted any power system. It has little to do with the mix of renewable energy and conventional fossil fuels.

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According to a statement from AEMO, the storm also damaged hundreds of powerlines and power poles and restoring electricity to all customers “may take days if not weeks”

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Battery storage may have helped steady the grid. Batteries have ultra-rapid responses to these kinds of disuptions and can add or subtract power from the grid within milliseconds to keep the grid stable.

…Read more: https://theconversation.com/a-major-blackout-left-500-000-victorian-homes-without-power-but-it-shows-our-energy-system-is-resilient-223494

The immense vulnerability of Australia’s industrial heartland to the severing of a single connection to a distant coal plant is a disgrace.

I don’t know why Professor Dargaville suggested batteries might solve the problem. Batteries could have stabilised the grid – for a few minutes. The suggestion any remotely affordable level of battery capacity could have maintained grid supply in the face of major and prolonged transmission outages is absurd.

More powerlines might have improved the odds of electricity getting to where it is needed – but more powerlines would also have been damaged by the storm. At best this would be a very expensive solution to energy resilience.

A distributed network of modular nuclear power plants could have eliminated the risk of a single point of failure bringing down the system, and could have reduced or even eliminated widespread blackouts.

If a network of modular nuclear plants was established inside Melbourne, Melbourne would not have suffered a major outage after the connection to a distant coal plant was severed.

But nobody is implementing sensible energy solutions in today’s Australia. Australia’s climate obsessed politicians only permit uselessly unreliable green energy solutions which don’t actually solve anyone’s energy problems.