Hundreds of thousands of customers were left without power as wild summer storms and searing heat took a toll on Victoria’s grid, requiring “load-shedding” to keep the system stable.
Catastrophic summer storms have wreaked havoc on Victoria’s electricity system, taking down transmission lines and forcing the state’s biggest coal power station offline, leaving half a million customers without power and stoking fears about the vulnerability of the grid.
“This outage merely highlights how fragile our system is. Support for net zero will start to weaken if we get events like this regularly.”But Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said that if “catastrophic extreme weather” physically took out power lines, “then no matter what you do in terms of electricity generation or other technologies, that will cause outages”.
AGL’s Loy Yang A generator “tripped” or automatically went offline to balance supply with the reduced demand. Efforts to restore the plant, which accounts for 30 per cent of Victoria’s energy supply, were ongoing on Tuesday night, with hopes three of four units could be back up and running within hours.
High-transmission grid owner AusNet said about 160,000 of its customers were affected by downed lines. AEMO, which started negotiating to secure emergency supplies to cover the late afternoon demand peak, said rolling blackouts were used “as an absolute last resort”. It pointed to “widespread abnormal conditions namely severe weather” in Victoria, and cautioned of a higher risk of disruption at “multiple” plants as a result.
“This appears to be a multi-contingency market event with two major 500 kilovolt transmission lines tripping between Moorabool and Sydenham,” said Josh Stabler, managing director at adviser Energy Edge.Mr Stabler said another 1000 megawatts of electricity customer load had tripped “to maintain security”, probably an automatic response as generation came offline.of rolling blackouts this summer as the return of an El Nino weather pattern brought hot, dry weather, and more windless days.
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