South Australia cut from Australian national grid

• 7 years ago (2016-12-01)
• David Flin

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South Australia was separated from the Australian national grid for an hour during the night of 31 November/1 December, following an incident in the Victorian transmission network. This resulted in 200,000 homes losing power, and BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine was without power for four hours.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said South Australia was separated from the national grid because of an issue in the Victorian transmission network which impacted the flow through the Heywood interconnector. The separation caused local power outages in South Australia for about an hour overnight, as 220 MW of power were shed to balance the network.

BHP – which suffered a shutdown for weeks during September’s state-wide blackout also related to South Australia’s reliance on the Victorian interconnector – reacted furiously to this new outage. BHP is the state’s biggest energy user.

Andrew Mackenzie, Chief Executive of BHP Billiton, said power stability and security “continues to affect productivity at Olympic Dam. Olympic Dam’s latest outage shows Australia’s investability and jobs are placed in peril by the failure of policy to both reduce emissions and secure affordable, dispatchable and uninterrupted power.”

Tom Koutstantonis, Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy for South Australia, said BHP should just build its own power station, as it had done for its mining operations in other parts of the world. He said South Australia’s power system worked effectively as an island, and gradually returned power to those who had lost it. He said: “Load shedding can be very disruptive, and I hope that families and businesses were not too inconvenienced by the outages. South Australia is working with other states to improve the National Electricity Market so that it is more stable and fairer to all states. If we had a second interconnector to the eastern states, load could have been drawn from that jurisdiction to prevent power outages.”

Koutsantonis said more gas-fired generation was the answer, and insisted the closure of the state’s last coal-fired power station in May and the state government’s pursuit of a more than 40 per cent renewable energy mix had nothing to do with the power outage.