When the entire state of South Australia was blacked out, due a catastrophic wind-farm failure, it was big news. When the town of Broken Hill was blacked out for a week earlier this year: crickets. That a town of 20,000 people, once an industrial hub that produced half of Australia’s export wealth, was without power for a week should have been big news.
Perhaps it would have been, if it wasn’t such an inconvenient embarrassment for the ‘Renewables’ cult.
Because, you see, Broken Hill City Council boasted in 2018 that it would be Australia’s first “carbon-free city”. At a cost of $650 million, Broken Hill built a 200 MW wind farm, a 53 MW solar array and a large battery that could provide 50 MW of power for 100 MWh. “This is a great opportunity for Broken Hill and renewable energies,” then mayor Darriea Turley told the ABC. “What they will see is when there is an outage, the battery would click into operation.”
This boast was put to the test in October, when a storm took down transmission towers connecting Broken Hill to the grid. Writer Jack Marx, now resident in Broken Hill, described the outcome:
The power comes on from time to time, but goes out just as quickly. It gives us just enough time to power our phones and read emails from energy providers sent the day before, alerting us to the fact the power was about to go out. They also warn we don’t have much time, and to avoid using unnecessary electrical devices – air conditioners, fridges or fans that need a power point.
Far from a glittering showcase of the wonders of ‘Net Zero’, Broken Hill became its Potemkin Village.
“The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally.”
No wonder the mainstream media have avoided talking about it.
Instead, they brag about a few, cherry-picked, supposed-success stories. But are they telling the truth? Pfft, it’s the mainstream media we’re talking about.
It is common to see articles describing how wind and solar served all or nearly all of areas load during some time period. These descriptions are all misleading […]
It means nothing to talk about how much wind and solar has contributed if you don’t also share how much rotating machinery was also interconnected on-line. So, the question remains, “has anyone demonstrated that wind, solar and batteries alone can effectively supply reliable service to a general load of any significance?”
I think you already know the answer to that one: a big, fat, NO.
Because, no matter the ‘capacity’ of wind and solar, they remain inherently unreliable. Enthusiasts claim that ‘big batteries’ are the answer but, as Broken Hill brutally demonstrates, they clearly are not.
Wind and solar energy were available in abundance during the blackouts. The energy just could not be reliably integrated with the grid. Having enough kWhs at the right time and place is not enough to reliably serve loads.
The real problem is that wind, solar and batteries do not readily provide essential reliability services. Wind, solar and batteries provide energy through an electronic inverter. In practice, they lean on and are supported by conventional rotating machines. Essential Reliability Services include the ability to ramp up and down, frequency support, inertia and voltage support […]
Australia has spent large sums of money to make solar and wind work better with the grid and improve reliability. Recent outages and grid performance in Australia indicate that many great challenges are still ahead before a grid powered primarily by wind, solar and batteries can provide reliable power. The physics of the grid require more than the kWh’s of energy from wind, solar and batteries, even with state of the art inverter technology.
So, for all the blatherskite of the Climate Cult, cases like Broken Hill remain as embarrassing correctives to green hubris.
The Australian called the blackout a “green power warning”. Mayor Tom Kennedy cautioned that policy makers, should learn from this experience how useful those resources are “almost useless” without baseload power. Solar panels were not only useless, but actually hindered efforts to establish reliability such that customers were urged to turn them off. “(Wind and solar) are worse than useless (in a crisis like this), because it’s detrimental to having a consistent power supply”.
Some $650m worth of renewable energy investment within a 25km radius of Broken Hill has proved to be dysfunctional. The technical challenges of operating a grid on renewable energy alone appear insurmountable using the current technology.
So, this Christmas, when your Climate Cultist relative starts banging on about ‘renewables’, just point to Broken Hill and refute it thus.
