South Australia Power Blackout

So the designed in protection systems worked exactly as they were designed to when they were needed to?

Where is the flaw/problem in that?

"Dear CR4 members.

I have a generator with a 20 amp circuit breaker on it and the breaker trips every time I either overload the circuit or damage the power cord and short it out. How can I make it so that doesn't happen without damaging anything or losing power?"

That's what I am hearing here.

How about continuity of service?

Not being able to supply power for a whole state seems a bit of a problem for a prolonged time. We are talking hospital backups running out of fuel, millions wiped off in groceries, a sperm bank destroyed; shall I go on?

Yes safety systems have worked but with the above outcome.

One of the suggestions is that a power grid needs a certain amount of rotating mass.

As a side effect I just realised that without this wind and solar power are unable to start the net by themselves.

So what needs to be done to integrate "renewables" into a secure power grid? There will be leanings from this incident thats for sure.

"rotating mass" ≠"spinning reserves"

Spinning reserves are engines (or combined cycles) that are already up and running at perhaps minimum load, that can be ramped reasonably quickly to respond to a step increase in grid load, or to a step (or ramped) drop-off in some other source, such as wind energy. Typically, to maintain a stable grid with wind energy, the field has to be very large, should have some storage (pumped hydro and thermal storage beats flywheels or batteries), and needs spinning reserve in proportion to the portion of the wind generation field that can fall idle at a point in time.

Silicon thermal storage (as molten silicon with thermo-photovoltaic output) should begin to become available within the next several years. High efficiency, very high energy density, small package.

Those are the leanings. But even the Silicon thermal storage would need the spinning reserves to work in the grid or not?

No. Molten silicon thermal storage pulls power from the grid until at its operational point, about 1450 °C. Thermophotovoltaic devices couple the energy back out again in a very efficient manner. The level of sophistication is unrivaled. The efficiency compares well (even at this early stage) with pumped hydroelectric (which in Australia should actually work pretty well), and the energy density at 1 MWhr/m³ essentially blows everything else out of the water besides nuclear.

Please send me a link for the high efficiency silicon thermal storage device.I am interested.

Thanks!

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161007100750.htm

Best I have at the moment.

Google: thermal energy storage device

?

Where did I say it was, is or will be my problem???

I neither live there, work for the utility company in question nor was I affected. I just came across it from another thread (unrelated to CR4) and thought I put it out for discussion.

You fail to understand that back up generators only last so long and an entire state out of power and no fuel pump running means there is no diesel available after a certain amount of time.

I was hoping this point was obvious but probably not so.

According to the preliminary report, they outage was about 24 hours duration or so, not all that bad, considering it was a full-on storm (not a storm to end all storms, but hefty).

It is not entirely unusual in the NE corridor of the United States to have lengthy outages for storms, including such events as freezing rain, and other maladies.

You are correct in implied assumptions about what happens after the lights are off for more than one day (or so). The good thing about being human is although we make mistakes, we are also tool makers, and creative. I suspect someone would come up with a few fuel tankers with their on board pumps, and come up also with a way to reverse the pumps they use for off-loading, if that feature is not already available.

I further suggest that pumps powered by gasoline or diesel can and would be used to pump fuel from UST's. Beyond that there is the natural gas pipelines, totally serviceable in that area, with supply available to run black start gas turbines, but OH SNAP! The Aussies did not have any? They need to call GE right away to solve that issue.

I wasn't implying it was directly your fault. It's general contextual thing.

As for backup generators I have been around and worked with many and any decnet commercial one can run literally for years nonstop so long as it has fuel and regular oil changes and even many of them in high service applications are set up to do actual on the fly oil and general service work.

And by commercial I don't just mean huge megawatt stationary sets either. Many of those can go a decade plus equivalent run times.

The ones I have been around the most are in the sub 100 KW range all the way down to the little 3 - 5 KW mini diesels sets used for construction site lighting rigs. Jus tin that range I have seen many that had 30,000 - ~40,000 running hours on bone stock never been worked on other than oil changes service.

In my books that a service life of 4 - 5+ years nonstop run time so, no, I am not buying the 'they only last for so long' excuse. Especially given a cheap home use portable unit with a low end Briggs and Stratton gas engine can easily run for over a month non stop before beginning to wear out.

"They only last for so long" when they are really cheaply built, or abused or not serviced as they should be. In normal proper operation nonstop running even for several weeks at a time is not a problem.

Ah, contextual!

You tell 'em buddy! Good job!

I just get annoyed when people start blaming others for their own poor planing and lack of action to take care of themselves.

Years ago when there was the likelihood of a real bad winter storm coming in it was common to hear announcements on the TV and radio the day or two before mentioning that things may get bad for a few days so try and get your emergency preparations done including adequate food, water, heat, standby electrical power and if you don't have those things have access to someone who does that can help you out.

As a kid we rode out many a 2 - 4 day storms and aftermath with no electricity and only a single crappy fireplace to keep us warm. Worst one I am aware of was something like 8 - 10 days where most of our whole state and local electrical grids were down.

I remember some of those during winter storms in West Texas. (Believe it or not, we do have winter storms). In fact, the night my dad and a buddy of his rolled into West Texas from Central Texas many years ago, they stopped in the small town of Seminole, TX, and that night the temperature dropped to -30 °F, in what I believe to be a record, official or not. They survived with no fire, merely by covering up in a pile of fuzzy cotton seed.

They had to light a fire under the Model A the next morning to get the transmission and the engine thawed out. In the general store there, everything including the bread was frozen solid.

This is what happens when pesky wombats burrow under the power towers, and topple them over during a wind storm during peak production (with not that many places to go??)

All true statements. Even given their bad planning, having some black start capabilities could have lessened the impact, could it not?

At least nearly all the magic smoke stayed where it was supposed to stay.

Somebody else already has the tagline "common sense dictates".

Pretty sure, I could make a use of it too. No?

If you like to be a copycat, yes.

Forget it! Not here!

So it seems. Thanks for the update from Down-under.

All of the sources are from Australia.

And you are right the first hint I got was from a European website with a link to joannenova.

It is not unusual for humans to overestimate or underestimate. A recent US election is having much the same effect. Does Australia have natural gas fired generating stations. Those seem to be the answer most common right now for the inevitable disruption in renewable energy sources. Granted nuclear is probably more efficient in certain aspects, it is not a popular or in many cases possible option where as natural gas is also "scalable", much more "on demand" than other fossil fuel sources, and somewhat less heavy in the carbon footprint dept. Having excess capacity is not a bad thing either.

Why sir, I believe I totally concur with your brilliant assessment of the situation.

I think Australian researcher are among the forefront of the field known as molten silicon energy storage. The recent report on the research I saw was based up research from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, however.

Up to around 1 MW-hr/m³ energy storage density is possible rather handily with these systems. I am not clear on the ability to scale these up to perhaps 100's or 1000's m³ systems, but I feel confident this will not be a major roadblock. Energy is coupled out by the use of extremely efficient thermophotovoltaic generator. Efficiency in the upper 60% range are already achieved as I recall. The energy stored obviously has a time limit (sort of like an expiration date), unless the heat leakage can be utilized for district heating needs, and additional power is expended on maintaining the temperature of each melt. Coupling-decoupling also appears to be somewhat of a non-challenge at this time.

Systems such as this will mean a lot in arid zones where pumped hydroelectric is simply out of the question (unless ocean water could be pumped far enough inland for storage in a salt lake).

Sounds similar to the northeast blackout where a fault in the distribution system cascaded back through the system and sequentially overloaded distribution nodes. The conditions that led up to the failure aren't unheard of and the solution will likely be to modify the programming of the protection system to accommodate the likely faults in the future.

It may also lead to some additional redundancy and resilience designed into the system. I don't see that the method of power generation is really an issue. The grid would have gone down whether the source was wind, solar, gas turbine, coal or nuclear.

The problem is in many ways almost unavoidable so long as the primary generation points are set up as large value contributors to the overall system.

When the system is running at near 100% capacity and there are multiple supply points representing 10% or more apiece all themselves running at near 100% of output capacity one going down is going to bring everything down simply due to the remaining online sources not having enough combined reserves to react and support the loss of any single large source point in the system.

Thats where the many small units opposed to only a few large central power stations concepts works better. Having a single 1 - 2 MW wind generator drop out suddenly on a gigawatt power system is hardly noticeable but having a 100 - 200 MW wind farm suddenly drop off is.

Having lots of little generators rather than bigger ones seems better at first glance.

However, power operators do not want a situation where bits of a system are kept live at unknown frequency and voltage. The connection licences make sure small generators shut down quickly if voltage or frequency deviate from normal (small is less than 50 MW installation to a "grid" man).

The specifications for solar inverters ensure they will shut down if they are not connected to a grid.

Generators as big as 10 MW may not be required to have frequency governors and remember most windpower is induction/slipring machines which cannot work without grid to magnetise them.

As has been pointed out, with great distances and power lines "on the ground" there are no miracles possible.

New York, New York was blacked out in 1973 by power line failures. Excessive snow loading on lines due to exceptional weather was the cause. One line falling knocked over the parallel back-up line. Snow at near freezing point sticks & builds-up. Such conditions are common in UK & tower designs were thoroughly tested with twisting forces - corner towers are most vulnerable & that is where the failure began. Power companies are equipped to deal with lines & towers down but there is a limit to the supply of personnel & ready spares if a whole lot go down.

So I reckon South Australia's major decision is whether to pay to reinforce the transmission line towers etc to withstand a higher wind speed.

Ignoring the definition of the word <...we...> for the moment it would appear that, although the demand exceeded the capacity of the system to supply, the protective equipment worked exactly as intended and caused a black-out, rather than a burn-out.

The outcome was operationally regrettable, perhaps, but it was far less intrusive than a need to repair and rebuild large chunks of the system that may have caught fire, evaporated, or suffered some other sudden and catastrophic self-disassembly were the situation otherwise.

Also see here:

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/109859/South-Australia-Power-Blackout-2

Yet another early report, still awaiting more "official" reports.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-06/uhlmann-on-power-blackout-in-south-australia/7906844

Who claimed it to be capable of long term base load supply?

It is like the space saver spare tire in your car.

To be used for a short term emergency.

I would rather have it than not have it.

At least it gives time to make other arrangements,such as reducing or eliminating non critical loads,etc.

Their primary use is to trim peak loads,thus reducing the load on primary power generators,thus reducing the size of the primary generation facilities,and using the existing infrastructure.

The danger of trying to off load the energy generated on a real time basis has already been covered in this discussion,but that was not the original intent or suggestion.

The real danger is politics of the large utilities that sense the reduction in revenues from distributed solar power.

Hawaii has already started charging self sufficient solar customers to put power back on the grid,instead of paying for it,claiming that they are using THEIR infrastructure to distribute the power.

Wait a minute! WHO payed for the infrastructure in the first place?

The same customers that now are being charged to put power into it!

As someone once said:"Politicians are like pigeons--they will grovel at your feet to get what they want,then when they get over your head,they....well you know what pigeons do best."

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." - Aesop