Quote:
Originally Posted by AussieTrooper
The report was quite clear that the towers that fell were north of Adelaide, not the ones that connect to Victoria. The blackout was caused when the Victorian interconnector overloaded, caused by a generation shortfall from the wind turbines shutting down.
If anything, the load shed that their collapse caused actually helped the situation, by delaying the overload on the interconnector.
The problem is that the wind turbines shutting down did actually set off this chain of events. The sensible thing to do is to either add another interconnector, or another gas turbine backup generator.
But the hysterical (and wrong) thing to do would be to stop investing in renewables entirely, and that's probably the most likely outcome here.  |
We have plenty of gas generator capacity Ben - but they were just sitting idle because the wind was doing the job - it is cheaper to use wind or buy coal fired power from interstate. My understanding is that the wind generators shut down when they sensed major disruption to the network - which was when the power lines fell down. The trigger was not the wind generators, it was the power line failures that forced the wind generators off the network. The one remaining question is how sensitive the wind generators are to load fluctuations - I would guess that the owners of the turbines have the shutdown threshold set low to protect their investment, but maybe it is possible to allow them to temporarily go into overload to ensure grid stability - that might be an area to investigate further.