Blackout in South Australia leads to calls for national grid upgrade

• 7 years ago (2016-10-03)
• David Flin

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The Federal and South Australian governments have called for new or upgraded connections in the national electricity grid to ensure national energy security across the country, despite a dispute over whether a recently closed South Australian coal-fired plant could have stopped the state-wide power blackout last week.

Greg Hunt, Australia’s Industry Minister, and Tom Koutsantonis, South Australian Treasurer and Energy Minister, both said that new interconnectors are needed in the national electricity market to provide consumer, business, and investment security.

Hunt said: “There must be a more integrated system of providing consumer and investment security. This means that the states will have to consider new or upgraded interconnectors between Tasmania and the mainland, and South Australia and the eastern states.”

Koutstantonis said that if regulatory settings meant that interconnectors aren’t financially viable for private operators, the federal and state governments should be prepared to contribute to their cost.

While they agreed on the need to strengthen the transmission network, they disagreed about whether having a coal-fired baseload power station in Port Augusta, which closed in May 2016, would have averted some of the problems in the system.

Hunt said: “If South Australia policy had not deliberately forced the Northern baseload power station offline, supply to Whyalla’s Arrium steel plant and to BHP’s Olympic Dam smelting operations would almost certainly have been continuous. This would not only have saved millions of dollars of lost income, but provided a basis for future investment security. It appears that the South Australian and Victorian state governments are seeking to deliberately drive baseload power out of their systems for ideological reasons.”

Koutsantonis said that the decision to close the Northern power station was made by its operators, and that, even if it had been operating, the point at which transmission lines had been broken would have meant it would only have added to the power surge which forced the shutdown of the system. He said: “It would have made it worse, putting more load on one end of the line and damaged more infrastructure. There was no incentive or disincentive from the government to close the power station. The operators (Alinta) made a commercial decision ahead of an IPO. We had nothing to do with it.”

Preliminary advice from the Australian Energy Market Operator is believed to show that it was a transmission problem, which started when 22 towers were hit by cyclonic winds, and not the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources that started the knock-on process which saw the South Australian system shut down.

Koutsantonis said that more renewable generation would be needed around the country if the federal government was to meet its 23.5 per cent renewable energy target and, later, its Paris climate change targets. He said that with physical constraints on solar, wind, and gas power in many eastern seaboard states, there needed to be a national agreement on where those assets should be built, then an upgrade of network connections to allow the entire country to access both the cheapest and cleanest energy available at any time.