Bushfires: East coast power grid under threat from heat blast
The east coast power grid is under stress as faults at two critical AGL power stations force them to go offline as temperatures soar.
The east coast power grid is facing fresh threats as faults at two critical AGL Energy power stations in Victoria and NSW force them to go offline as temperatures soar and bushfires threaten transmission lines from the Snowy Mountain hydro scheme.
The immediate threat will come at the weekend when high temperatures hit NSW’s energy infrastructure.
The concerns about the power grid come as up to 120,000 people in NSW could face a bushfire nightmare at the weekend as looming firestorms threaten to engulf communities stretching hundreds of kilometres from Nowra to the Victorian border, and west to Kosciuszko.
Residents and tourists in Batlow, the Shoalhaven region, Batemans Bay, Snowy Monaro and Khancoban will be cut off from escape routes on Saturday after a “brief window” to get out of the 250km-long disaster zone closed on Friday night.
Rural Fire Service Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers said those who chose to stay in the “leave zone” would risk “waking up trapped” by fire on Saturday when 40C temperatures combined with strong winds and lightning to create a “potentially deadly” situation. He said Saturday’s conditions would rival those experienced on New Year’s Eve, when multiple lives and 449 homes were lost.
On Friday, an eighth person was confirmed dead after police located the body of Colin Burns, 72, inside a burnt-out vehicle 50km northwest of Cobargo on Thursday. Mr Burns, a former volunteer firefighter, was killed when the out-of-control Badja Fire ripped through the state’s south coast.
Ahead of the new blast of heat, the Australian Energy Market Operator on Wednesday warned generators that weekend temperatures in NSW might put their power stations under stress.
AEMO has issued a second warning that “there is a possibility of bushfires impacting multiple transmission elements in NSW”, with some transmission lines between Victoria and NSW already down because of the raging fires.
Most at threat are power lines connecting the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme with the national grid, with NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean confirming on Twitter that a significant risk existed.
“Backburning operations in place to protect assets as well as other measures. At this stage, enough capacity in reserve to keep the lights on across NSW, though risk of blackouts in fire-affected areas,” he said.
AEMO said it believed it had enough reserve capacity to meet expected demand in the national energy market at the weekend, but the situation remained volatile.
Exacerbating the risks to the grid is a fault at AGL’s ageing Liddell plant, which will force the closure of one of four 500 megawatt units feeding the NSW grid to fix a boiler fault.
The danger to Victoria’s power system through summer grew again on Friday, with AGL confirming it would be forced to keep a troubled unit at its Loy Yang A power station offline for another three weeks after discovering new problems that require work on its boiler unit. The unit has been out of commission since May, and was briefly returned to service in late December before engineers took it down again.
Across the scorched south coast, a mass exodus was under way on Friday as thousands of terrified tourists abandoned their holiday rentals — braving toxic smoke that blackened the skies — to evacuate before raging infernos return on Saturday.
The Rural Fire Service said this weekend would be one of the worst periods yet in the state’s catastrophic fire season, with Andrew Constance, the NSW Transport Minister, warning “it’s going to be a blast furnace”.
Thousands of displaced people yesterday flooded the Princes Highway, crowding the roads from Milton to Nowra.