State of South Australia Suffers Electrical Blackout

The State of South Australia, which is a state in South-Central Australia suffered a complete total loss of electricity this past week. There are about 850,000 homes and businesses in South Australia.

While apologists rush to blame “climate change enhanced severe weather” for failure of the grid in South Australia, Larry Hamlin finds that this problem with wind turbine farms maintaining frequency and causing a blackout was foreseen and published. South Australia's Wind Energy Crisis

This analysis exposes the extraordinary energy market distortion that the politically mandated use of renewable energy has created.

Renewable energy cannot be reliably used without placing demands on electric system stability that can only be provided by dispatchable fossil power plants.

Yet renewable energy is given preference in use over fossil plants based on political policy mandates even though the costs associated with electric system stability must be provided by fossil plants which experience lower operating hours thus increasing fossil plant production costs.

Additionally these electric system stability costs climb as more and more renewables are placed in use. Renewables energy projects however are never held accountable for these increased electric system stability costs that occur and in fact these increased system costs are concealed from view by renewable energy advocates.

Electricity costs in South Australia have increased 70% in recent years as fossil fuel power plants were removed from the grid for economic reasons. In other words, the fossil fuel plants were driven off-line by the subsidized renewable power plants. Once they were off-line, the renewable power plants raised their prices as there was no competition from the fossil fuel plants.

The removal of the fossil fuel plants were a significant cause of the blackout because the wind and solar plants could not provide stable 50-60Hz frequency electricity for the grid. This very action is taking place in the United States with the removal of the nuclear power plants from the grid network, and if the environmentalists have their way, all fossil fuel plants will be shut down.

Texas and Georgetown should be aware of these kinds of unintended consequences and assure sufficient fossil fuel plants remain in operation to provide competition for renewables and stable frequencies for the electric grid and all the users.