An Australian state wants to invest another $100 million into green energy after wind turbines caused a statewide blackout.
South Australia plans to add a 100 megawatt solar power plant backed-up by batteries in the hopes the system will stabilize its power grid. An over-reliance on wind power recently crashed the grid. Supporters say solar power can stop future blackouts.
“The blackouts of the past year would not have happened if this was in place,” Ross Garnaut, the chairman of the solar power project, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “We think that it can make a major contribution both to grid stability and also to provide a buffer for when peak demand for power exceeds supply from other sources.”
Supporters of the project want more help from the government, and claim current power market regulations make it hard to economically operate solar plants. South Australia is also considering investing in a pumped-hydro power storage facility to store power and help stabilize the grid.
Australia’s Energy Council noted in early September increasing solar and wind power “has not only led to a series of technical challenges” but “also increased wholesale price volatility as the state rebalances its supply from dispatchable plant to intermittent generation.”
Roughly 25 percent of homes in South Australia have solar panels installed. The state gets 41 percent of its power from wind, solar and other green sources.
Officials concluded that “violent fluctuations” in the supply of wind power caused a blackout affecting 1.7 million people in South Australia in September. The Australian Energy Market Operator blamed the blackout on a wind farm in Snowtown that suddenly stopped providing 200 megawatts of power, destabilizing the grid.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull blamed South Australia for “distorting the national energy market” by putting too much emphasis on generating electricity from wind farms.
“This has been very much a Labor obsession, to set these heroic renewable energy targets,” Turnbull told a radio station in October. “They assume that they can change the composition of the energy mix and that energy security will always be there and the lights will stay on, and that has been brought into question.”
Unstable wind power likely caused other state power grids to cut off energy flow to South Australia, collapsing the grid. For a moment, the state looked more like North Korea than Australia.
Independent experts believe the ability of an electrical grid to absorb green energy becomes increasingly more difficult at scale. South Australia’s reliance on wind power makes blackouts more likely because the amount of electricity generated by a wind turbine is very intermittent and doesn’t coincide with the times of day when power is most needed.
South Australia’s power crisis caused the price of electricity to hit 200 cents per kilowatt-hour of power. The average Australian currently pays about 25 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity, according to research by the country’s parliament.
For context, electricity costs the average American 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Major businesses in South Australia have already threatened to suspend operations entirely until the price of power comes down.
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