You might have heard of Broken Hill. It’s a lonely town in New South Wales and it nearly just became a lot lonelier. Transgrid, one of Australia’s power companies that is “leading the transition to a clean energy future”, decided that Broken Hill could showcase operating on its own microgrid. In a display of monumental eco-hubris, Transgrid even tried to shut down and decommission the town’s two emergency diesel generators.
The experiment lasted just two weeks. According to the ABC, a windstorm – one of those normal events that Net Zero planning typically fails to foresee – brought down seven supporting transmission towers. Although Broken Hill had held on to its backup generators, one was being serviced and the other failed under the sudden demand. According to the mayor Tom Kennedy:
“There was only one generator that was put under extreme amount of load,” Mayor Kennedy told 7.30.
“Once that was put under load, that also tripped out and we were in a situation where some people in town were without power for 48 hours, others just over 24 hours.
“It was really lack of maintenance on generators that are worth probably $50 million each.”
The upshot was that 20,000 people were left without power and the mines that are the basis of the local economy had to be shut down too.
Even the Guardian covered the story but dodged commenting on the implications for Net Zero:
The outages have followed severe thunderstorms on October 17th that damaged power lines, with dodgy backup generators leaving 20,000 locals with on-and-off power.
Repeated brownouts, particularly throughout the evening peak, occurred when electricity supplied by multiple generators was unable to meet demand.
There was more concern in the Guardian about consumers’ bills:
Two power companies – Origin and EnergyAustralia – have agreed to defer bills to those who have been affected by the outages that crippled the region for the better part of a week.
Customers won’t receive free electricity, but won’t be hit with a bill for a minimum of 30 days and the companies will not chase outstanding debts.
Nick Cater provides more of the complex background in the Australian to how this scenario arose at Broken Hill, pointing out that unfortunately the expensive backup battery hadn’t clicked in as it was supposed to, either. It seems that the plan had been that in a situation like this Broken Hill should be self-sufficient:
Three years ago, Transgrid boasted that the outback town could run on a renewable energy microgrid if the line to the outside world went down. It was so confident that it sought permission from the Australian Energy Regulator to decommission the two diesel generators installed in the early 1980s. The AER said no, a decision criticised as “really silly and perverse” by Chris Bowen [Australia’s Minister for Climate Change], who held it up as an example of the antiquated energy market thinking he intended to fix.
Bowen has yet to comment on the fortnight of rolling blackouts across the NSW far west that began when seven transmission towers collapsed on the 260km high-voltage line to Buronga.
The power company concerned is AGL, “Australian Gas Light Company”. Pity it didn’t stick to its name.
Bowen was not there to witness the indignity of AGL’s new mega battery being recharged by diesel generators or watch the Silverton wind turbines sit idle because they weren’t connected to the grid. He didn’t see Broken Hill residents hunting for the off switch on their rooftop solar arrays because their fluctuating output tripped the diesel generators.
To describe the Silver City’s experience as a setback for Bowen’s dream of turning Australia into a nuclear-free clean energy superpower would be an understatement. Broken Hill was the renewable energy industry’s Potemkin Village, the recipient of $650m of green investment and the proposed location for the world’s biggest advanced compressed-air energy storage plant.
In 2018, Broken Hill City Council announced its goal to become Australia’s first carbon-free city by 2030. Three years ago the Mayor at the time, Darriea Turley, welcomed the announcement that AGL was proceeding with plans to build a grid-scale battery, which the company claimed would be a reliable backup power source for 10,000 homes.
“This is a great opportunity for Broken Hill and renewable energies,” Turley told the ABC. “What they will see is when there is an outage, the battery would click into operation.”
AGL had badly misled Turley and her fellow councillors. When the storm hit at about midnight local time on Wednesday, October 16th, the battery clicked offline, not on. The town sat in darkness for several hours until the single operating backup diesel generator could be turned on.
A $41 million battery!
AGL was not prepared to keep a $41m battery fully charged, primed for that just-in-case moment. The battery was dispatching power into the national electricity market from early evening on the day of the storm.
The battery was offline for more than eight days while it was reprogrammed to feed into the local grid and recharged with rooftop solar and diesel. Silverton and the Broken Hill solar plant did not resume operation until the region was reconnected to the grid last Thursday. Turley’s successor as Mayor, Tom Kennedy, was pictured wielding a shovel at the soil-turning photo-op for the battery in November 2022. He told the ABC the battery closely aligned with the council’s desire to see the Silver City at the forefront of renewable energy and energy storage.
Tom Kennedy’s changed his tune now:
Last week he told Chris Kenny on Sky News, “There’s no way that renewables at this time are capable of supplying Broken Hill… The reality is it’s not consistent power. You don’t have that baseload power, so for Broken Hill it’s almost useless.”
The principal lesson from Broken Hill is that a stable, consistent baseload supply produced by rotating turbines is essential for stabilising the grid’s frequency and underwriting fluctuating demand. Converting DC power from wind and solar to synchronised AC current becomes harder the more renewable energy is put into the system.
Not everyone has been as quick as Kennedy to wise up to the monstrous deception the renewable energy industry practised. Last Monday, Australia Institute Research Director Rod Campbell appeared before a Parliamentary committee on nuclear power to argue for the rapid phasing out of fossil fuels, “which is what climate science demands”. Nuclear power was a distraction, he claimed.
Campbell’s testimony involved insisting nuclear power was too expensive while admitting he had no idea how much a renewables-only plan would cost. “I haven’t researched that.”
Tellingly, the Australia Institute posted a video of Campbell’s testimony on YouTube, suggesting it wasn’t aware that he’d made a clown of himself. The anti-nuclear left is immune to contrary facts, paying homage to “the science” while disregarding the laws of physics, urging us to abandon fossil fuels by this time tomorrow while never once considering the constraints of engineering.
Is this a sign of things to come for Britain? Yes, but with the proviso that the costs will be astronomically higher, the consequences and complications of the engineering issues magnified, and the political fallout utterly catastrophic when people start discovering they have to sit in the dark, eat cold food out of lifeless refrigerators and shiver through a winter’s night.
The Broken Hill experiment shows that Net Zero is pie in the sky where pigs fly. We can make plenty of use of renewables but 100% will never happen bar some unforeseen technological revolution. Certainly not by 2030.
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” even tried to shut down and decommission the town’s two emergency diesel generators.”
These zealots need to be sectioned!
https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/markets-and-trends/input-prices/carbon-tax-on-fertiliser-due-to-hit-farms-and-food-prices?origin=serp_auto
Some further worrying news on the farming front. More taxes on fertilisers. Just as disturbing, we don’t make any of our own fertilisers now it is all imported. I wonder when Kneel will ban the use of cowshit being spread on fields?
I hear the natural manure for liberty trees is quite good.
Actually in today’s Mail there is something that the farmers can do to hit back at Two Tier and Thieves and that is to refuse to take sewage farm sludge to put on their fields. This will quickly give the water companies a big headache as to what to do with it.
“We can make plenty of use of renewables”
Yes – to disfigure the countryside, increase energy bills and funnel public money to people selling useless products and to China.
“Renewables” make no sense to me – can anyone explain what use they are?
I tend to prefer the word ‘unreliables’ rather than renewables. It is a much more accurate description.
Agree, we must not cede the language to the Eco Loons.
Always use “unreliables” instead of “renewables”, and “hydrocarbons” instead of “fossil fuel” (which is a derogatory term, with negative connotations – fossil means old fashioned, out of date, backward).
And always, always please “Project Stone Age” instead of “Net Zero”.
Stop calling it Renewable. It isn’t renewable …… it’s Intermittent Energy. If you use the oppositions language, you have already lost the argument.
Good point!
I love this definition of Renewable Energy from the UN’s Climate Action page:
“Renewable energy is energy derived from natural sources that are replenished at a higher rate than they are consumed. Sunlight and wind, for example, are such sources that are constantly being replenished. Renewable energy sources are plentiful and all around us.”
Phrased like that, who could possibly see it as anything but good? Simplistic summaries like this have hoodwinked the majority of the population, including leaders and influential organisations, into believing it will enable us to ditch hydrocarbon-derived energy. If you have the ability to laugh in the face of approaching disaster, you’ll find the whole page quite a chuckle, and admire the way it neatly sidesteps all the trifling issues of intermittency, cost to the consumer and the logistics of transmitting the energy from where it is “plentiful” to where it is needed.
Why isn’t this headline news everywhere? Literally EVERYWHERE?
Because the eco zealots all have their trotters in the trough and are too invested in the ‘science’ to back off now.
In my part of Scotland, the west, we are near two of the biggest wind farms. For the past week we have had barely any wind, therefore no ‘wind generated’ electricity. The week before we had extremely powerful winds, too powerful for the wind turbines, therefore no ‘wind generated’ then either. We are being conned big time but the idiots don’t get it.