Western NSW blackout ‘a green power warning’

The mayor of Broken Hill has warned federal and state governments to learn from the experience of his town beset by blackouts as residents were told to switch off their solar panels.

The power station on Pinnacles Road at Broken Hill in far west NSW. Picture: Richard Dobson

The mayor of Broken Hill has warned federal and state governments to learn from the experience of his town beset by blackouts as residents were told to switch off their solar panels, with nearby renewables proving unable to aid its energy crisis.

A storm last week destroyed ageing transition towers in the far-west NSW town of almost 18,000 people, leaving a 400km area with intermittent outages that could last another fortnight.

The nearly 200MW wind farm and the 53MW solar farm are not connected to the system and the solar farm is privately owned. The owners are negotiating a commercial agreement with Transgrid, but that has yet to be finalised. Miners in the town are now reportedly being forced to take leave.

Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without baseload power.

“(Wind and solar) are worse than useless (in a crisis like this), because it’s detrimental to having a consistent power supply,” he said. “I’d hate to see what happens in the capital cities in a similar crisis.”

Essential Energy on Friday was urging customers in Broken Hill to switch off their solar supply main switch to protect the 40-year-old backup gas-turbine generator providing power to the town and surrounds.

Speaking in Broken Hill on Friday, NSW Energy Minister Penny Sharpe said she’d be visiting impacted communities across the weekend with Barwon state MP Roy Butler and that “extra resources” were en-route.

She encouraged residents to reduce their energy consumption where possible, saying: “That means turning off your lights in rooms you’re not in, turning off non-essential ­appliances.”

The minister said that the area’s renewable energy sources would not be an immediate solution but that its “feasibility” was being looked into.

“In the future that’s absolutely the plan (to also use renewable energy sources), that’s what needs to occur,” Ms Sharpe said.

“We need to be able to have a network of renewable energy that’s got good-quality, long-duration storage, so problems like this don’t happen.”

Former Broken Hill resident and mining executive Robert Williamson, who was in the town on Friday, said “a lot of people knew that this would happen one day”. “Now that it’s happened, it’s had to happen to prove to the government and others that it was configured wrong from the start,” he said.

“At the moment Broken Hill is without power for 32 hours the other day, the mines aren’t working, everybody’s food is spoilt.”

Businessman Dick Smith warned it was an example of what was to come.

“It’s an example of what’s going to happen to the whole of Australia if we try and go ahead running 90 per cent from solar and wind like Labor says. We’re going to end up with the most incredible blackouts,” he said.

The construction of temporary towers has begun and they could be up and running by ­November 6.