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South Australia statewide electricity blackout. 10

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GregLocock

GregLocock

Automotive
Apr 10, 2001
23,765
South Australia has been steadily reducing its reliance on in-state thermal power, relying more heavily on a combination of windpower and interconnects with states that still burn coal. On Sept 28 the entire state went black, and remained that way for several hours. Here's the updated preliminary report




Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
Interesting read Greg, thanks for sharing. Some parallels with the UK as our older thermal plant retires while the number of wind turbines and interconnectors to Europe both increase.
 
Pie in the sky stuff by the State, and the residents will suffer. Plenty of coal in Australia, but South Australia now has no coal fired plant. The quote in the attached article says it all "We have not yet got on top of how to manage intermittency". Wind, solar, geothermal...they have it all, but it is all intermittent.

 
Table 4 is pretty interesting. It looks as though the ride-through setting of each group of turbines was set in different ways, and the ones that were set to be most persistent and fault tolerant hung on to the bitter end. No surprise really. The other ones conked out in a cascade of failures, overloaded the interconnect, and blew the big fuse. The State Premier is trying to blame it on the transmission line failures, not his precious wind turbines.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
I'm curious, what is the population of the affected area?? How many deaths, say due to electrical failures at hospitals have been attributed to this incident?. I'm guessing that weather in this part of the world is pretty mild in September and nobody froze to death. Here in Canada, Alberta with a population of 4 million is heading down this road, shutting down coal fired station, subsidising wind and solar, ( today's temperature minus 20 Centigrade). Ontario, population 14 million is further ahead, shutting down coal plants, refusing to build gas powered plants, nuclear plants coming towards the end of their life, already has some of the highest hydro rates in North America.

Even with a population of 14 million, I suspect that any similiar incident here will not produce the necessary outrage to cause the politicians to start to understand science and engineering. It will take a massive death toll somewhere in the USA with a high population density and a black out in severe sub zero temperatures for common sense to set in. Cities in Germany, Sweden etc might get a bit cool occassionaly but I don't believe anywhere in Europe is taking the same levels of risk.
 
In our part of Alberta we had a build-up of freezing condensation on our distribution lines that caused multiple outages over a wide area in November.
Our power was out for about 21 hours. I fired up the standby diesel and we had no issues with heating or water or sewage (both on pumps).
We did lose our cell phones and internet connections as soon as the standby batteries went dead.
I should install an indicator light to tell me when the grid is back, but for now, my neighbour does not have a generator but he does have a pole mounted yard light. He leaves it on 24/7 and it is easy to see from our place.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
miningman - Few if any deaths have been identified. Certainly many problems with backup generators were demonstrated. You are right, in warm climates power failures are fairly benign, cold is far swifter. Total population affected is less than 2 million.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
Interesting that wind turbine protection only offers a restricted number of low voltage ride through incidents before tripping. Does anyone know why - is it because they are usually DFIG (double fed induction generators.

In the UK we are consulting on DfG (Directive for Generators) and I wonder if National Grid realize this.
 
I know of one utility in Canada using JungleMUX equipment and fibre optic cables running with their transmission lines to isolate faults and avoid "Domino" type progressive trips and the resulting large grid failures.
Is this a one time installation or is JungleMUX becoming widely used for utility protection?
Link

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
Well, I'm sure the bright lads in Canadia have thought of this, but if they sent a master clock signal over the fibre optics then all the windfarms and PV and hydro installations could sync to that after a blackout and the whole system should be able to re-synch gracefully.

Incidentally a friend of mine stuck his DVM into the wall socket the other day and measured 277V RMS (on a 240V service). Sunny day, affluent neighborhod, lots of PV systems feeding into a cranky old distribution network.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
Looking at the graphs it looks like the system collapsed in about a second.
As I understand it, somewhat simplified, A number of wind turbine sources were seeing the same disturbances. Apparently they were all set to allow the same number of ride-throughs before tripping and so all tripped at the same time. With that much capacity lost, one of the main interconnects for imported power, the Heywood interconnector, overloaded and tripped off. From there it was all over in a few cycles.
Have I made any major errors here?
I suspect that the system will go to a system of staged WT shutdowns to allow time for the load shedding system to respond.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
They have just had a fourth wide scale blackout. The State Premier is busy pointing fingers all over the place. It doesn't really matter, the whole state is a retirement village, with a few government funded employment facilities for those not old enough to live on a pension.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
Great post Greg... I suspect other parts of the world will see a similar type of failure... Canada, included.

Dik
 
Back in the early 2000's California experienced a summer of black/brown-outs but it turned-out that they were the result of the manipulation of the energy markets in the Western United States by the now infamous Enron Corp. They would create a situation where it appeared that the supply of energy was less than the demand thus forcing the utilities to purchase power from out-of-state sources at elevated prices thus padding their profits. This and other events eventually led to the failure of Enron and the resulting scandals that followed.

Now I'm not suggesting that something like this is happening 'down under', but you never know...

For those interested in what happened in California:


John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
Hoxton,

The crowbar or IGBTs are probably set to short the rotor DC bus before the power electronics overheat due to high currents on DFIGs. After several disturbances, they probably can't follow the LVRT curve due to already being hot.
 
Thanks - makes sense
 
Just a question to ponder: But if we use electric cars and the power is off, is that a good reason to not go to work?
 
carrying that ponderance farther. If you work for the Utility,would they require you to have a NON electric vehicle, so you can get to work during an outage
 
Funny that I see all the NON-electric trucks plugged in every morning.

We use several natural gas trucks, but mainly for servicing natural gas customers.
 
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