[AusNOG] Adelaide Power Issue - DR planning

[Sam Silvester]

Morning Chris!

In terms of being better planned for - from what I have heard generally,
everything ran pretty well post-blackout. All of the hospitals had no
problems with their backup power systems, all carriers / data centre
operators that I have heard had plenty of fuel ahead of time ready to go
and staff were available to keep an eye on things.

To be honest, with the number of facilities and generators that were all
called on at once, I'm a little surprised at least one facility or
thereabouts didn't have a problem, murphy's law and all.

Further comments inline:

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 8:02 PM, Chris Hurley <chris at minopher.net.au> wrote:

> Given the topics running this week on threat matrix's from low level
> chance / high impact etc this appears to be case of a known event coming ie
> bad weather It was forecast days in advance as being possibly hugely
> damaging. Why wasn't it better planned for?
>
>
Can't wait to read the AEMO report. That will be interesting. Planning for
interruptions of generation and transmission lines is absolutely something
already done.


> It appears little was done to mitigate if breakers kicked in to drop them
> off the grid. Yes breakers needed to kick in BUT no one looked at powering
> up base load ahead of the time to restore the system. Coal or to a lesser
> extent gas fired generators take time to wind up to speed ie several hours.
> Surely they could have been 'fired' up ahead of time.
>

There is no coal generation in SA (and it would seem if the one that
recently shutdown was still in use, it would have been on the wrong side of
the transmission line that got destroyed anyway, so not much help in this
case).


> Some one also forgot wind is useless in very high winds. You have to turn
> them off or they 'destroy' themselves. There are already reports of
> political finger pointing.
>

(from http://whrl.pl/ReI248)

Wind was doing 950MW according to the NEM market data in the interval
before the system blacked out.

Sam
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