there are still intelligent and clever idiots who don't want to understand the dynamics of this planet...

 

Addd CO2 in the present gaseous mix of the VERY THIN atmosphere and the surface temperature goes up...

GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC...

 

See also 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279

 

Note that the cool southern ocean in the map is in line with the postion of warming continents. The North Atlantic cool spot is also due to a concentrating vortex that melts Greenland.

 

Europe is presently experiencing temperatures 4 degrees Celsius above average

 

 

The last time an entire state blacked out was on the night the Beatles arrived in Sydney in 1964.

So what happened in South Australia yesterday was rare and the repercussions could be vast.

The key question is whether that state's heavy reliance on wind turbines might have increased the risk of a state-wide blackout. More broadly, the event will supercharge concerns over how renewable energy is being integrated into a national grid that was not designed to cope with it.

This silly analysis was witten by Chris Uhlmann, an ABC "journalist" for the right wing and apologist for the climate change denialists. 

The real key questions is whether Australia's political position on renewable and coal burning is exarcerbating storms under a global warming situation.

Global warming is here and getting storms to become worse. Not doing anything about it with renewable energy will lead to more problems, not less.

 

Similar shutdown of the grid happened in the US networlk of coal/gas/nuclear power stations, a couple of decades ago. Nothing to do with renewables, just a design of the networlk which cannot be "overloaded", thus shuts down during a storm of sorts (or excess demand  of "heat" due to cold storm)... NOTHING TO DO WITH RENEWABLES.

In Germany, for example, according to some of Gus' sources, renewables are producing "more" electricity than can be consumed by the country on many occasions and it sells the surplus to neighbouring countries. During "low" demand, some of the windmills are prevented to spin by feathering the blades.

It should not take years for the engineers to know what to do. One does not have to be Einstein to work out a formula for switching power stations, windmills and solar farms as to manage the network — even under "extraordinary" conditions...

And Turdball is also a COMPLETE idiot:

Malcolm Turnbull says South Australia blackout a wake-up call on renewables

PM’s comments comes as Jay Weatherill accuses Coalition of pushing anti-windfarm agenda and playing politics when thousands of households still have no power

• Is this a new low: politicians using a natural disaster to push a fact-free agenda?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/29/jay-weatherill-ac...

Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, has slammed Malcolm Turnbull’s response to South Australia’s once-in-50-years storm, saying he is peddling “ignorant rubbish” by conflating the state’s blackout with its heavy use of renewable energy.

Andrews said the prime minister’s comments about the storm on Thursday were so ideological they could have come from the former prime minister, Tony Abbott, but at least Abbott would have waited until the natural disaster had abated before making similar statements.

He said Turnbull chose to link the two issues of SA’s extreme weather event, which knocked out the state’s transmission system, and the state’s use of renewable energy.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/30/ignorant-rubbish-...

 

One big storm and our climate and energy debate is surging back to peak stupid.

Now Malcolm Turnbull has encouraged the campaign to use the South Australian blackout to slow the shift to clean energy, saying state renewable energy targets are “extremely unrealistic”.

Except all the evidence says the state targets are exactly what Australia needs to meet the promises the prime minister made in Paris last year about reducing greenhouse gases.

Of course it would be preferable to have a consistent national policy to reach those goals, but it’s not exactly the states’ fault that we haven’t got one.

That vacuum was Tony Abbott’s proud achievement, with the abolition of the carbon price and the winding back of the federal renewable energy target, after a lengthy debate about whether it should be abolished altogether, which of course dried up almost all investment in renewable energy.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/01/the-lights-go-out-in...

AS I WROTE on Thursday and as others have pointed out on this site as well, the Turnbull Government rushed in where angels fear to tread and disingenuously blamed renewables for the blackout in South Australia.

They used the blackout as an opportunity to bad mouth renewables — in part, doing so to defend their coal mining mates and their profits.

In the longer term, it is about trying to force the states and Territories to cut their current – and, in the words of both Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Minister for Energy and the Environment Josh Frydenberg, "unrealistic" renewable energy targets under the guise of a national renewables target.

The Commonwealth’s renewable energy target is 23.5% by 2020 while, as the Clean Energy Council points out in their 2015 report, some (Labor) states are aiming for up to 50% by 2025. In the ACT, the target is 100% renewables by 2020.

The only thing unrealistic about these state targets is they are too low. Oh hang on, there is a second aspect to this unreality. The states are nowhere near achieving their targets. In NSW, for example, renewables usage in 2015 stood at almost 8% and in Queensland, it was a bit over 4%.

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/sa-blackout-t...

 

South Australian blackout: When the lights go out, it's a sign the electricity grid isn't working well

ANALYSIS

By political editor Chris Uhlmann

Updated about 3 hours ago

Don't read more: it's shit journalism...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-06/uhlmann-on-power-blackout-in-south-australia/7906844

 

When you have a fierce storm, anywhere in the world, there can be problems with the electricity grid and the switching. It does not mean that the whole thing is crap, it means that with global warming, the ferocity of storms is going to be worse.

What creates global warming is THE BURNING OF COAL AND OTHER FOSSIL FUELS. 

The list of blackouts and outages before renewables is very long: see again below... the problem has NOTHING TO DO WITH RENEWABLES. The South Australian electricy grid could be in need of improvements but this HAS  NOTHING TO DO WITH RENEWABLES.

Many operators in the US and Europe know that they can have problems when a"storm is brewing" and powerlines can be damaged... NOTHING NEW. 

Chris Uhlmann's article is an apology for the Liberal (conservative) idiots.

the ABC’s political editor, Chris Uhlmann, has doubled down on his controversial claim last week that South Australia’s heavy reliance on wind generation is linked to the blackout. The former AM and 7.30 host also openly taunted his critics by tweeting his latest analysis with the comment that it “should keep the pitchfork crowd busy for days”.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/07/abc-viewers-go-dark-on-chr...

 

THE BLACK OUT HAS  NOTHING TO DO WITH RENEWABLES.

The ABC’s political editor Chris Uhlmann said there was an online “vigilante mob” who loved to attack him for what they perceive as his rightwing bias.

“Quite frankly, there is now this vigilante mob that exists online, that basically congregates the minute it smells blood,” Uhlmann told Guardian Australia after he was criticised for linking the South Australian blackout to the state’s use of renewable energy.

read more: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/15/abcs-chris-uhlmann-says-he-is-standing-up-to-vigilante-mob-try-criticised-for-bias-by-online-vigilantes-on-the-left-and-right

 

Chris Uhlmann was WRONG to link the South Australia blackout to renewables. But he won't see that. He is an idiot journo sprouting the idiotic ERRONEOUS views of the denialist right wing. That's all. Blaming "vigilante mob" for his stupid comments does not add to the debate. Just make him appear more and more entrenchedly foolish. Idiot.

And the problems are well known to the South Australian Government.

The state's Energy Minister, Tom Koutsantonis, acknowledged the high take-up of wind turbines and rooftop solar cells in his state was making electricity security "a complex matter", in a letter to the Energy Market Commission in July.

"Issues with managing the transition are already emerging in South Australia," the letter said.

Wind poses two engineering headaches.

The first is well understood, it is intermittent: if the wind does not blow, the power does not flow.

The second is more complex.

Electricity networks have to keep demand and supply near the perfect harmony of 50 cycles a second (50 hertz) every second of every day.

If the frequency gets out of tune, the system identifies a fault that trips the shutdown switch.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-19/wind-power-loss-key-event-in-sa-blackout-report-finds/7947478

Yes Chris... we all know that. Engineers know that and solutions are available.

A wind turbine is designed to produce power over a range of wind speeds. All wind turbines are designed for a maximum wind speed, called the survival speed, above which they will be damaged. The survival speed of commercial wind turbines is in the range of 40 m/s (144 km/h, 89 MPH) to 72 m/s (259 km/h, 161 MPH).

Most wind turbines can operate with strong winds up to 100 km/h. The maximum electric output from the wind turbines is reached with winds around 35 km/h. thereafter, the blades are feathered accordingly as not to exceed spin while still providing maximum output.
The problem in South Australia, did not come from wind turbines, nor wind farms output, but from the grid which has to take into account various output from wind farms, solar farms and gas fired power station. Nothing new. The grid engineering is available and should work, even in stormy conditions. Balancing output and consumption is not new.
There has been oodles of outages (see list supplied) around the world THAT DID NOT INVOLVED WIND TURBINES. Here with knowing that winds were going to exceed 100 km/h, and possibly go out of sync, the electricity supplier of South Australia could have fired mothballed gas turbines in anticipation or adjusted the coordiation.
What can happen during storms as well is that the electric cables from supply to consumers fall down, leading to a shut down of supply. Here with wind turbines, the blades would go idle. Gas turbines would shut down as well, should the distribution network be damaged.
In France, during a hot summer, some nuclear power stations had to shut down because the cooling water from the rivers were TOO WARM. In 2000, in that country about 70 percent of the cable grid went down in a mega storm. It took several months to rebuild the system and according to locals some thiefs also stole the copper wire on the ground to resell overseas...
Chris Uhlmann CARRIES on with his niggling analysis of a situation. Nothing to do with wind turbines, but the sudden drop of transmission of said power, possibly due to a fail-safe system which automatically shuts down when the various supply get out of phase as well.
In the north east part of America a few years back (no wind power in the grid) a small shut down led to a domino effect outage that left nearly 30 million people without electricity.
The engineers can solve the synchronisation problem without making a song and dance about it, in a couple of days.
Solutions of homogenising the various power supplies are available from wind turbine suppliers… No need to harp on it nor freak about wind power or solar panels.
Time for Chris Uhlmann to put a sock in it. The engineers would know what to do without him frothing at the mouth once more on the ABC. Actually he should laud the fact that wind power is cutting down CO2 emissions in South Australia, as well as in Germany which now exports its excess electricity from wind power, I've been advised by my German friends.... There is cash in the wind...

 

If you study carefully the picture at top, you would know that the North Atlantic "cold spot" is due to the melting of Greenland. The Antartic cold band is due to Antarctica melting. It's the ice in the whisky effect...

A street pole that blocks garage access to a new house in suburban Adelaide is a "cracking example of very low-quality infill development", a councillor has said.

West Torrens councillor John Woodward said council approved a housing plan that split a block in Daly Street at Kurralta Park to allow two new dwellings, but the builder then changed the garage location.

"I just don't think there is any way you could reasonably get a car in that driveway," Mr Woodward told ABC Adelaide.

"The advice I've been given is that the council could not change the location."

He said councillors had now voted to write to the state Planning Minister about what they saw as a growing problem as metropolitan housing density increased.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-31/new-house-garage-completely-blocke...

Can I hear people muttering stuff about wind turbines creating the problem... ? Nearly.

Senior executives from AGL Energy have given evidence that the main issue causing problems with reliable energy supply in South Australia is “dysfunction” in the gas market – not too many windfarms making the grid unreliable.

Executives from AGL told a Senate inquiry in Melbourne on Tuesday they would like to build a new gas-fired power station in South Australia to increase base load capacity in the state, but gas supply was chronically unreliable in the eastern states.

Richard Wrightson, AGL’s general manager of wholesale markets, told Tuesday’s hearing the problem was so dire the company was contemplating building its own LNG hub in Queensland to help secure reliable supply downstream.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/07/energy-executives-sa...

Today, the ABC news went to Chris Uhlmann to explain what the South Australian govenment did in regard to invest 500 million into energy supply for the state, especially gas turbines. Of course, one could see Ulhmann dancing on his chair for being "vindicated" about the unrelaibility of windmills... WHICH WAS NOT THE CASE FOR THE SA GOVERNMENT. 

In fact the government is going to invest in storage batteries as well, which according to Ulhmann wous provide only one hour of electricity (snigger snigger) after the providing entities had completely shut down. The main part is that the problems that the South Australian State has had CAME FROM THE SUPPLY LINES being down, NOT THE WINDMILLS, AFTER  GIGANTIC STORM that had been exacerbated by GLOBAL WARMING which will increase due to coal and gas power supply amongst other things. 

Chris Uhlmann looked a bit too smug, as if "vindicated" for his SILLY comments of last year. HE IS NOT. HE STILL IS A DENIALIST of Global warming and he should shut up. Wind power is here to stay.

South Australia's biggest power provider, AGL, has issued a scathing assessment of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and its investigation into the cause of last September's statewide blackout.

AEMO issued its third and final report into its handling of the blackout in March.

It blamed overly sensitive protection mechanisms in some wind farms for setting off a chain of events that led to the September 28 blackout.

In a submission to a South Australian parliamentary inquiry into the blackout, AGL questioned the process undertaken by AEMO to assess its own performance.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-09/agl-slams-aemos-sa-blackout-report/8510028

"AGL has significant concerns in relation to apparent discrepancies and omissions in the third AEMO report," the AGL submission said.

AGL's submission suggested the AEMO report:

• Incorrectly described wind intermittency as being immaterial to the events of the day;
• Attributes transmission faults to tornadoes rather than lightning strikes;
• Does not properly consider the likelihood that the slow clearance time for one transmission fault contributed to the tripping of the Heywood Interconnector;
• Potentially implied that "but for" the tripping of wind farms, the statewide blackout would not have occurred.

"AGL does not believe there has been sufficient analysis of the root causes of the Black System Event," the company's submission said.

Read more:

 

Along the remote southern coastline of Western Australia, the locals have cottoned on to a new, surefire way to keep their beer cold.

The energy grid around Esperance and Ravensthorpe is unreliable at the best of times, but after a bushfire took out the poles and wires around these far-flung outback towns last year, the power company asked residents if they might be interested in trying out a more economically and environmentally sustainable way to keep the lights on and the bar fridge humming.

Rather than fully rebuild the sprawling infrastructure required to reconnect all residents to the grid, network operator Horizon Power turned to WA renewables pioneer Carnegie Clean Energy to help roll out stand-alone solar and storage systems.

The Carnegie managing director, Michael Ottaviano, said the scheme had led to a new phenomenon in the towns. “People assume the grid is something reliable and permanent, but in reality it is a centralised system with very long lines out to remote communities – it is in fact highly susceptible to failure,” he says.

“And when it does now we’re hearing our customers are having blackout parties. You take Raventhorpe for instance, which has several hundred houses, only half a dozen of which have our systems – the people living there suddenly become very popular when the power goes out.”

Rodney Locke, a farmer near Esperance, says blackouts had plagued his property long before the Yarloop bushfire decimated the area’s energy infrastructure last year. He says he jumped at Horizon Power’s offer for an alternative way of doing things.

He had his property fitted out with a solar and storage system, and has had the odd visitor since – although nothing too out of hand, he says.

“There are a couple of people we know who drop in once a week anyway, so, well, if there’s a blackout, instead of sitting at home in the dark, they come and visit,” he says.

“The beer does stay colder with the power on – it doesn’t have to be drunk as quick. Actually, come to think of it, maybe it should be the other way round? Maybe we should be the ones visiting the places with no power – help drink their beer before it gets warm.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/may/15/blackout-pa...

A solar panel development that has taken decades is a step closer to reality.

Final trials of printed solar panels on sheets of plastic are underway at the University of Newcastle in the New South Wales Hunter region.

Using conventional printing technology, electronic ink is printed onto clear plastic sheets with the finished product incredibly lightweight.

The creator of printed solar, Professor Paul Dastoor, said the emerging technology is expected to shine in disaster-affected areas.

"What we do know right now is that if there's a disaster the first thing people need is power," Professor Dastoor said.

"Typically that's generated by a diesel generator and you have to truck in fuel."

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-15/printed-solar-trials-helping-energ...

Power losses appeared to be the state’s most widespread affliction. In news conferences up and down the state, mayors and utility executives delivered the dispiriting statistics: In densely populated Pinellas County west of Tampa, about 70 percent of Duke Energy’s customers, or 395,000 people, were without electricity, with no immediate restoration in sight. Mayor Tomás Regalado of Miami said a similar fraction of his city was dark, with roads left impassable and traffic lights not working. In Orlando, about half the city’s utility customers had no service.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/us/irma-jacksonville-naples.html

Tell that loony, Chris Uhlmann who talks shit.... that when the lines are down, power is cut... NOTHING TO DO WITH RENEWABLES !