[AusNOG] Lessons Learned From SA Blackout

[Mark Newton]

On 30 Sep 2016, at 5:10 PM, Matt Baker <matt.baker at colocity.com> wrote:
> While Adelaide does not suffer from the normal tropical events that other parts of Australia do we are very dependant on the interstate connector to Victoria for our power capacity. Normally this isn’t too much of an issue. During a power issue a few months ago when the interstate connector went down they needed to load shed in order to reduce usage to match generation capacity.  At that lime the CBD was excluded from the load shedding.

This wasn’t a capacity issue, it was a frequency stability issue. Early days yet, but it appears that a cascade of line trips due to frequency protection took down the whole network.

It shouldn’t have happened like that: The network was working before the transmission lines fell over, and it’s working now while they’re still on the ground, unrepaired. The question is why it couldn’t work during the state transition, and I expect that’s what most of the upcoming investigation and resulting post-mortem will be concentrating on.

I think the report will need to have a section on protection engineering which explains why the network behaved like that, and how engineering standards can be altered to make it not behave like that anymore. 

> I don’t think anyone could have predicted this occurring,

ETSA did predict it happening after the statewide outage in the 1980s. They had a plan to split the state into North and South islands roughly cutting through Adelaide in preparation for a major event, so that they’d probably only lose half the state instead of all of it.

It’s unlikely that that plan survived the industry restructuring caused by privatization, and it certainly didn’t survive the more recent move towards distributed generation.

I think privatized energy markets should view themselves as having a structural instability: The degree of coordination required to do whole-of-network planning is now impossible, with different market participants having different economic incentives to behave in different ways. My expectation for the SA electricity industry to effectively put lessons learned into action to prevent a repeat of this event are pretty low, I think it’ll happen again unless there’s a pretty deep intervention by the regulator into the way the industry behaves and coordinates.

Regards,

  - mark