South Australia’s power woes could spread nationwide

The problems troubling South Australia’s electricity grid could spread to other states.

The system strength problems troubling South Australia’s electricity grid could spread to other parts of the nation as power networks struggle to keep up with a rapid shift to renewable energy, the state’s transmission operator ElectraNet has warned.

It emerged that the national electricity market is relying on emergency safety nets to keep the lights on, amid revelations the energy market operator stepped in more than 100 times last year to order South Australia’s gas generators to provide supply.

The deterioration of the strength of the electricity network — most pronounced in South Australia — will also continue to spread to southwest NSW, northwest Victoria and north Queensland, adding to wholesale costs incurred by users.

“We are starting to see some of the issues which first emerged in South Australia permeate throughout the national electricity market,” ElectraNet’s group executive for asset management, Rainer Korte, told The Australian. “It’s getting more attention now it’s moving to the bigger states.”

SA’s electricity system is increasingly operating under the direct intervention of the grid operator, with last-ditch interventions reserved for emergencies becoming a default way of managing the network, as slabs of renewable generation test the system’s strength, the Australian Energy Market Commission said yesterday.

Wind and solar now provide more than 50 per cent of power generation in South Australia, but legacy transmission infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with the switch to renewables causing havoc in the strength of the power system.

“Pushing all this renewable supply into the system has put us in this position of having to manage these technical issues for the first time in a way that we haven’t needed to before,” Mr Korte said.

ElectraNet — the privately owned operator that is planning to develop a $700 million interconnector with NSW — says the installation of three synchronous condensers should be in place by next year to help address problems with system strength.

The unprecedented surge in renewables has up-ended the nation’s transmission system, much of which is decades old and was largely designed to cater for coal, which still supplies about 70 per cent of electricity in the system. Now thousands of smaller generators, including variable renewable supply, are connected to the grid, raising new pressures on the grid operator to ensure voltage and frequency — the nuts and bolts of a power system — are maintained to keep the lights on.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the AEMC report showed that the market is on “life support” with state and territory Labor governments pursuing high renewable targets, creating reliability and security issues. “The government is committed to ensuring enough dispatchable generation is available to meet the electricity needs of Australian families and businesses,” Mr Taylor said.

“That is why the government is stepping in and has implemented the Underwriting New Generation Investment program and the Retailer Reliability Obligation.”

Separately, a push towards virtual power plants — where a network of small-scale solar and battery systems can be controlled and fed into the electricity grid — has received $2.5m in funding from the federal government as part of a trial with the Australian Energy Market Operator.

The power grid operator will run a trial over 12-18 months that may include AGL’s pilot scale virtual plant in SA. AEMO estimates there may be up to 700 megawatts of virtual power plant capacity running by 2022.