How a single cloud brought the NT’s second biggest town to its knees

‘IT will be chaos’: Independent report reveals how a single cloud brought the NT’s second biggest town to its knees

An independent report has revealed how a single cloud brought the NT’s second biggest town to its knees

• TOP electricity bosses sacked after damning investigation
• ALICE Springs blackout’s cause revealed
• ‘WE warned you’: Union calls for urgent action over power problem

A POWER and Water manager has described the electricity generation system in Alice Springs as “an absolute third-world train smash”, warning the town faces more widespread blackouts this summer.

“Bali has better network management capability,” the manager said.

“All I can say is – god help Alice Springs this summer. It will be chaos until next May.”

Power and Water chief executive Michael Thomson and Territory Generation chief executive Tim Duignan have been sacked over the debacle that saw Alice Springs residents lose power for up to 10 hours on October 13.

An independent report found a “sudden and unforeseen” reduction of solar generation from the Uterne solar farm triggered a series of events that saw the power cut, back-up systems fail, and major delays in having electricity restored.

Sacked ... Territory Generation CEO Tim Duignan

Sacked ... Power and Water CEO Michael Thomson

The independent report – conducted by Entura – found there was a major drop in generation from the Uterne solar station after a large cloud passed over about 1.43pm.

“The output of Uterne solar station was relatively constant at around 3.3 MW until 1.43pm. At 1.43pm a cloud passed over the station and station output became highly variable with reductions in output to as low as 0.5 MW”

A failure of generators, battery storage and load shedding systems to operate as expected then triggered the blackout “with insufficient spinning reserve and at best zero regulating reserve”.

A separate report by the Utilities Commission said the solar station’s output reduction was not the “root cause” of the blackout, “as a power should be designed as far as practical to be sufficiently robust to withstand this”.

“However, it is further evidence that the current systems may not be agile and robust enough to support an early transition towards the Territory Government’s 50 per cent renewables by 2030 target.”

The Power and Water manager said Alice Springs was “always on the razor’s edge” of a major power outage due to a range of infrastructure factors.

An independent report found there was a major drop in generation from the Uterne solar station after a cloud passed over it

“This debacle is created by a need to run generation to Alice as efficiently as possible on their clapped out gensets, so they set their power stations to generate a planned amount of electrical supply based on trends and guesswork and they hope they get it right,” he said.

“They basically need to match production to consumption and hope like hell that the two line up.

“When it comes to electrical generation – think of water trickling into a bucket with holes in it and as water goes in, water is leaking out of holes in the bucket keeping the level the same.

“If you run it dry or overflow it then the result is chaos.”

He said the blackout was the result of this impossible balancing act.

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“Too much electrical generation can’t be stockpiled or stored anywhere and literally needs a place to go, which requires generators to be backed off to crucial low levels and results in partial blackouts to the network,” he said.

“Likewise, too much unplanned consumption eats up the very, very small (spinning) reserves in the supply. Either way – get it just a bit wrong and you have computer-controlled generators scramble their own brains and turn themselves off to protect from overload.”