By Paul Homewood
Didn't Premier Jay Weatherill promise South Australians that Elon Musk's massively expensive battery storage installed a couple of years ago would protect them from future blackouts?
SA Power Networks has apologised to tens of thousands of South Australian customers who were left without electricity during the state's record heat.
The electricity transmission company has confirmed about 25,000 properties were blacked out when infrastructure began to buckle in the extreme conditions.
Ninety transformers crashed across the state's transmission network while a substation at Fulham Gardens tripped, leaving 15,000 western suburbs customers without power late yesterday.
"After days of heat, we were in some unchartered territory yesterday with record heat and record load sustained well into the night," Paul Roberts from SA Power Networks said.
"We understand customers would be inconvenienced by these outages. Given the number of outages affecting small localised groups of 50 to 170 customers, the crews did a great job to restore most people's power before first light today.
"In terms of what happened, equipment like humans is affected by heat. A number of transformers overheated and their fusing operated as it should to prevent a catastrophic failure," Mr Roberts added.
Energy Minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan says the government used every tool it had available to prevent forced load shedding yesterday, with the national energy market operator calling on the state's backup diesel generators for the first time.
"We had enough electricity in South Australia to meet our needs. It was close but we had enough," Mr Van Holst Pellekaan said.
And it is no good them blaming the heat. Back in October they experienced another massive blackout, which they blamed on a few storms:
Thousands of people are without power in South Australia due to a massive blackout across the state.
Almost 20,000 properties including homes and schools are being affected by 75 power outages in the state's south.
Extreme weather conditions are being blamed for the blackouts, and earlier today the Bureau of Meteorology issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Adelaide.
As Stop These Things reveal, the real problem is overreliance on utterly unreliable wind power.
Tesla's mickey mouse battery storage, only able to maintain 100MW for 80 minutes, is little better than spitting in the wind.
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2MD5LBG
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