© Jo Nova
By Jo Nova
“It’s just a matter of time” says Frontier Economics chief Danny Price
Even though it was a public holiday, there was a raging bonfire in prices in South Australia on the evening of Australia Day. The spike in prices hit a blistering $20,000 peak and stayed there for three long hours…
Expert Danny Price warns of ‘catastrophic’ national grid failure after SA price surge
By Patrick Starick, The Advertiser
The average price for every hour of the 24 hour period in South Australia was $2,457 per megawatthour.
Dan Lee at WattClarity tracked the big batteries in South Australia and says they were run almost flat by 8:30pm. The 1.5GWh battery was down to 66MWh — empty.
This outcome is perhaps unsurprising given that much of the region’s battery fleet contains around two hours of duration, while the period of sustained high prices extended for more than three hours, pushing many batteries toward their energy limits as the evening wore on.
Danny Price thought it was “very, very lucky” that so far, heatwaves have basically hit Australia on weekends and holidays.
The state was running on an LOR1 — lack of reserve, Level 1. for hours. So any unexpected unit failure or break in a line could bring down the system.
To shore up Australia’s electricity grid, obviously then, we need more public holidays and weekends? Do it for the nation, eh?!
Shame if you run a business…
“The 1.5GW battery was down to 66MW — empty.”
Should those units be GWh and MWh?
[Indeed, Fixed! Thankyou. – Jo]
230
TOXIC W & S + clueless 3 hour batteries are delusional parasitic nonsense and yet our loony govt want to WASTE TRILLIONs of $ to make things even worse.
Germany has wasted decades and half a trillion Euros on this lunacy and yet Albo and B O Bowen want play follow the loonies and destroy our wilderness areas every 15 to 20 years and forever.
Who are the idiots who vote for these treasonous people?
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The people who vote for them are actually clueless. I have a dear friend who will always vote Labor no matter how stupid they are. Most have no idea how a grid works and they have swallowed the climate scam hook, line, and sinker. They usually have this idea that carbon makes up a large part of the atmosphere and they refuse to believe their lying eyes. The brainwashing has been very successful and will take a generation or more of real education to reverse the situation.
One bright spot I note that some of my grandchildren know that CO2 is beneficial and they do not accept the spin. They do listen to conservative reels and podcasts and they don’t listen to the MSM at all. No wonder the government is worried about social media. It has nothing to do with saving the children; it has a lot to do with saving a socialist, incompetent government.
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Black-Out Bowen should be paying for all of this….Out of his own pocket!
For all those woke states…Open the inter-connectors…and lock them open.
Especially after blowing up, and publicly bragging about it.
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Massive grid failure in Australia is currently being averted by:
1) the deindustrialisation of Australia which has liberated a lot of power and
2) as reported by Jo, the ability to load shed the few remaining large consumers of power like the Tomago aluminium smelter by Government paying your taxpayer money to, to enable this. Shedding that smelter alone liberates an additional 950MW.
Also, I think when grid collapse is inevitable, they won’t blackout entire cities, that would be politically unacceptable and noticeable, they will use smart meters to selectively blackout random (probably non-Labor voting) suburbs all over the country (on the east coast grid).
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The practicalities of using smart meters to load shed is that it can’t really happen fast enough to stop a cascading failure. The comms and systems to remotely de-energise are designed to facilitate customers moving in and out. When load shedding is needed it requires immediate large scale disconnects that can only be done quickly enough through large switching equipment at Zone Sub or Terminal Station level.
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If say a generator fails yes the smart meters are to slow to be effective at stopping grid collapse but they are more than adequate for stopping a growing demand from exceeding the supply. I would expect meters to be used for managed preemptive load reductions while substation level disconnects will be used in emergencies.
40
Grid failure will be averted by standard (Orwellian) practice: it will be called something else. Voluntary load shedding, perhaps, or fossil fuel failure. Until one day the people wake up.
What can wake the people up? Or who? If the next leader of the Liberal Party simply stands up and says the scam is over, then it’s over. Simple as that. Andrew Hastie, Angus Taylor, your next step is so simple, and you will be stunned at the wave of public support that you will get if you take it.
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Victoria also by compensating businesses to close down to stop using electricity when peak demand is expected to be higher than normal peak demand.
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Yes. I’ve thought for some years now that 1st pass rationing will be in non-Labour electorates using the “smart” meters.
So far I’ve resisted the installation of a “smart” meter for exactly that reason. I have no real idea when I will be forced to change on pain of no power supply.
The fact that most periods of high demand occur during holiday periods is not random. The country essentially goes to sleep during the late December-January period, and there are plenty of long weekends throughout the year.
I agree with RickWill that the grid is essentially smashed now. Too obvious. Clearly I don’t agree that an upfront cost of about $40k after tax hoovering to a household to go off-grid (which cannot apply to high-rise city apartment blocks) is a viable resolution.
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Not all grids. Perhaps the “National” grid, but grids such as the WA SWIS grid seem to be doing just fine. Ok, I realise that it only has to peak at 5GW, but it seems to be able to do that OK. Still wondering if every state wouldn’t be better off just managing their own grid.
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wondering if every state wouldn’t be better off just managing their own grid.
Some people might say you are picking on South Australia.
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Why? They claim to be able to rely on intermittent power, let them do so.
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It did cross my mind when making the comment, that it would be interesting to see what would happen if SA had to go it alone. They have had anxious moments when the interconnector failed for a couple of days.
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Every state used to manage their own grid until the NEM was set up in the 1990s. Up until then Australia had cheap and reliable electricity supply. It has been all downhill since then.
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Graeme, yes I think we should go back to state controlled electricity grids. It provided great competition between states like in a true market and each state usually received a nice dividend from running their own grid, which went back into general revenue. Having said that, Jeff Kennett couldn’t wait to offload the state owned assets during his government reign in Victoria. 2 things – the state was broke and needed some cash. Secondly, the unions at the time had too much industrial power and the LNP was glad to be rid of that problem. But it was definitely better and in hindsight ( such a wonderful thing !) paying SEC workers more would’ve been heaps cheaper than all the money wasted on renewables over the last 25 years. Via upgrades and efficiencies the over staffed SEC would have had a reduced workforce anyway. There was also much more chance of upgrades and new generators being built. But the climate change scam came along as well. Rest is history.
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I think that sharing the grid between the states hasn’t resulted in any worthwhile reduction of energy costs, nor any increase in grid reliability. It’s just that some states seem to be lifters and others leaners. And putting AEMO in charge overall hasn’t achieved anything.
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I agree with you. Kennett was way too much into privatization. I say this as a right-wing voter: it was a bad idea, even without the benefit of hindsight. Perhaps the Kennett government could not foresee the policy disasters to come.
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I’m not sure people appreciate just how broke the state was.
It was actually Kirner who started the privatising of the grid, selling off state bank, and school sites. That’s how bad things were. That even the Labor govt thought it was necessary to get rid of public assets. The SEC was full of waste, unions, excess staff. A Labor govt had no chance of reforming it and privatising was going to be the best way, as well as solving a serious debt problem. Kennett and Stockdale saw the job through and got the state headed in the right direction.
He wasn’t quite ready to release the purse strings at the 1999 election and thought he could get through one more election, then free up the cash again to win a 4th. But, enough of the voters had short memories and put Labor back in and he didn’t even get to win a 3rd election.
You can argue selling assets was short sighted. But you have to state your case while considering that the State’s ability to pay wages and do things had just about ground to a halt.
I doubt Kennett envisaged we would be paying for two electrical systems down the track. A reliable one and an intermittent one.
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interconnectors are just places to put meters to make money.
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Legislation requires all meters to be ‘smart’ by 2029, unlike our politicians..
I also told them not to fit it, I can see time-demand pricing coming in straight afterwards, then selective shutdown for people they don’t like.
South Africa sorted out how to blackout areas to keep demand down, I expect we will end up with the same.
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Of course, the way rationing should work is by starting in the areas with the highest proportion of Green voters, and then Labor, etc.
After all, they are the ones who are so very certain we don’t need electricity.
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During the hot weather in and near Melbournistan yesterday, I know of two friends who reported blackouts. One was in the Melbournistan suburb of Caulfield, another reported a localised outage in the town of Seymour. Obviously the grid is getting close to capacity, even with deindustrialisation and load shedding of aluminium smelters.
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Most of the outages yesterday were LV fuses blowing due to local overloading. There was not a shortage of supply (thankfully, or it for sure would have been much worse) but the distribution grid is build for only so much loading, just like the circuits in your home. Would need to spend a lot more on bolstering the local grids to avoid the main issue yesterday.
Not to disagree with the main assertion in the story, but mostly the main supply held up yesterday. Won’t be long though.
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It is interesting to note that the manufacturing businesses Albanese Labor are funding with taxpayer’s monies to avoid immediate closure are union workforce work places.
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Victoria was fortunate yesterday that Sydney and a lot of NSW wasn’t overly hot. So the inter-connector from NSW was probably supplying electricity. When we had our last major outage in Victoria from poor supply, there was bushfire threatening the interconnector in NE Victoria and the decision was made to close it down for the duration. If we get both NSW and Vic abnormally hot at the same time, that’s when we will get some really serious blackouts.
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In April I experienced a major grid failure. About half an hour after my flight from Sao Paulo landed in Lisbon the power went down across the whole of Portugal and Spain. There was few deaths as the temperature was around 20-25 °C. So no requirements for air-conditioning or heating. Imagine if it happened in January in either Australia or the UK.
Fortunately, there was limited back-up power in the airport (probably from diesel generators) for the 12 hours the power was down. My 4-hour stopover became 25 hours, and instead of a single flight home, was three, via Malaga and Amsterdam. Only had to wait two days for the luggage to be delivered.
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Hi Kevin,
If that was the April 2025 Spain-Portugal blackout, then you might like to read Kathryn Porter’s analysis at her blog at watt-logic.com.
According to her, the deaths of more than a hundred people are directly attributed to that blackout.
The lessons for South Australia from that event are clear.
Paul Miskelly
[See later comment #32 by Paul, providing additional info and the link.
https://joannenova.com.au/2026/01/catastrophic-national-grid-failure-coming-to-australia-says-grid-expert/#comment-2893781 ]
.
[Links added below. – hope they’re the right articles. – Raquel]
[Edit: I added wrong links, but relevant anyway -:Raquel]
Voltage, inertia and the Iberian blackout Part 1
https://watt-logic.com/2025/07/16/voltage-inertia-and-the-iberian-blackout-part-1-the-theory/
Voltage, inertia and the Iberian blackout part 2
https://watt-logic.com/2025/07/16/voltage-inertia-and-the-iberian-blackout-part-2-a-faulty-solar-inverter-crashed-the-spanish-grid12088/
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The last person leaving the country doesn’t need to turn the lights off – electricity at the flick of a switch will be a long-faded memory – but please, extinguish all candles before closing the door.
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As RickWill frequently reminds us, Australia’s grid is finished and no longer is economic.
The answer is to go off-grid but that unfortunately is not possible or only partially possible for people living in cities.
So I have an idea.
Why don’t we build a large coal, gas or nuclear power station, and distribute the power from that over the existing utility wires which currently are used to distribute random and expensive wind, solar and grid scale battery power. The technology is well proven and mature.
Such a power station could even be built on the site where once stood a power station, like Hazelwood in Victoriastan. The wires already go to that site. It even has a cooling pond that can also be used for recreation and a fishery with tropical fish.
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Great idea!
Have you told our Energy minister, Lily D’Ambrosio?
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It also has a coal mine, DM.
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I will continue to disagree with Rick, as surely the WA SWIS grid, functioning well by providing sufficient power at reasonable prices, surely shows that a properly-managed isolated grid using relatively cheap energy sources is viable. I believe the biggest mistake was to allow the useless AEMO to manage the National grid.
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Graeme4, I wouldn’t be too confident on the WA grid being a show piece of good management, it had some close calls in the 24/25 summer for LOR (lack of reserve) that were only mitigated by big consumers being asked to turn off or limit power consumption. Our retail prices are set to rise again similar to the eastern grid and it’s also being managed by the same incompetent ideologs at AEMO.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if utility solar and wind are being curtailed similar to the eastern NEM and the system is dipping to dangerously low demand at times that could cause frequency issues and blackouts.
Our idiotic WA Labor government have announced they will spend millions over the next 5 years to subsidise a foreign owned coal mine in receivership (Griffin Mine), that supplies a foreign privately owned coal fired Power station (Bluewaters), while doggedly sticking to closure plans for tax payer (state) owned coal fired stations Collie A and Muja in Oct 2027 and late 2029 respectively, which are fed from the non insolvent Premier mine.
They also simultaneously admit coal fired power is needed for the next 5 years or prices would likely jump a further 20%, hence their desire to keep Bluewaters running for that time, yet they insist on closing the state tax payer owned assets??!! Why?
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/coalmine-bailout-extended-on-energy-security-fears/ar-AA1UDvdn
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Does SA have a lot of smart meters, what about control of a/c units, I’m surprised AEMO allowed the demand to get so high that prices hit $20,000.
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A state election is due within eight weeks.
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First real poll for One Nation.
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Sadly SA has buckets of houses with solar panels. Those folk are second only to those in the ACT who are totally certain that they and they alone have already saved the planet and are in process of saving Australia, dontcha know. Absolutely detached from physical reality.
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People don’t realise that air conds can selectively be turned off remotely.
But not before an election.
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People don’t realise that air conds can selectively be turned off/down remotely.
But not before an election.
(SLANG is DRED) Direct Response Electric Device
21
Again here’s their so called dangerous CC and in fact we live in the safest period in Human history.
Last year in 2025 the global FLOOD death rates were just 0.04 deaths per 100,000 people and all of the other extreme weather death rates were just 0.01 deaths.
When will we grow up and learn to think?
Again we need to build more BASE-LOAD energy ASAP.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disaster-death-rates?country=Flood~Extreme+weather~Wildfire~Drought~Extreme+temperature
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Sorry I was wrong, EXTREME GLOBAL temperature death rates were 0.00 per 100,000 people last year in 2025.
Thanks again to OWI Data for telling us the TRUTH since the 1960s.
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Easy solution. Everyone work for the public service. They have diesel backup.
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“They have diesel backup.”
Built with our money.
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They wouldn’t want that. That means they would have to go to work.
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I support WFH. I say, go for it, as long as you do what you’re supposed to do. However, going to in-person meetings once a month or so is also a good idea.
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That all depends how much you value your career. Working from home is not a good career move. If you are looking at moving up the food chain within your company you need to network properly, you need to be on friendly terms with people higher up in the organization, IE lunches together, chats in the tea/coffee room etc. They also need to see and appreciate that you turn up every day and are taking your job/company/career seriously.
40
That’s how it once was.
Are you sure it still operates that way?
Your supervisor probably works remotely. You speak to him/her on the phone or via message. You meet via Zoom.
The opportunity to impress is still available, but in a different way.
Mind you, it’d hard to have a Aperol Spritz or Harvey Wall Banger together remotely.
20
Thanks Jo for highlighting this folly.
As well you know, because you have been tireless in publicising our papers, Dr Tom Quirk and I warned of this outcome years ago, from as far back as 2010, and over the years since. We were banished as “renewable energy deniers” by wind-promoting academics and policymakers.
More recently, I have circulated a report, from early 2024, of an analysis I have conducted which, using AEMO operational data, shows the utter futility of going the battery storage route in Eastern Australia, simply because, as elsewhere, the sheer scale of the storage requirement makes it unachievable. This too has been ignored by government policymakers.
Ours have of course not been the only voices to raise these warnings.
I mention this simply to point out that government policymakers have been warned, and that the warnings have been in place now for many years.
Just one observation re this recent event: allowing these “big” batteries to run near-flat is known to significantly affect their operational lifetimes. I’ll leave it to others more knowledgeable than I to report on the likely longterm consequences of that excursion.
Thanks again, Jo.
Paul Miskelly
200
It’ll need to be a gigantic blackout to shock the plebs into changing their voting habits.
On a different note, it seems the Crisafulli govt in QLD is contemplating making state polls optional preferential voting, like it used to be before labor banned it.
.
[Let’s not hijack the thread topic with a debate about preferential voting. – Raquel]
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He’s been saying this for many years and we’ve had the exact circumstances in which he predicted we’d get failure. And… no failure.
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We’ve always had blackouts and outages in our electricity supply. That’s a given. I was staying overnight in Swan Hill during winter years ago and the whole town blacked out. Learned later that a possum had crawled close to a resistor in the main substation ( seeking warmth ) and blew it up. What the real crime is, is the needless escalation of electricity prices over 30 years which has wiped out manufacturing and other major industry (eg processing) in this country. Leaves us vulnerable to overseas imports and pricing plus we’ve lost all those potential jobs. All for no good reason. Even if you believe in man-made climate change, Australia has virtually no effect on the world’s climate. Our population and CO2 emissions are negligible.
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My comment is about grid issues not local outages caused by things like transformers blowing locally (ie the sorts of things that happened decades ago)- grid failure is not happening. Mr Price also talks about price but it all seems a bit like arm waiving without nailing how renewables are to blame rather than the AEMO system.
015
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the AEMO pricing system introduced about the same time as renewables? And if this pricing system was altered to use longer time periods, then renewables would be severely disadvantaged.
So aren’t the two closely closely linked?
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This site is very slow right now and was offline earlier, possibly under attack (again).
Although, with Australian censorship laws as they are, it’s hard to know what’s going on.
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Yes, I was going to ask is anybody else getting the run around trying to log into Jo’s blog?
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Yes, I’ve had trouble most of this morning, thought it was just me.
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Similar- got the cloud fare warning again. Thought Jo had busted the internet again.
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Rusty:
Couldn’t get through to JoNova this morning. Everything else was OK.
Was told that the connection was timed out (twice as I also restarted my computer (not running Window 11).
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We have been without power since 6:00 p.m. yesterday. Fortunately I have battery backup to run the essential loads.
Ausnet has been inundated with grid faults.
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Your setup will be earning its keep, good work.
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Power was restored at 1pm today. The off-grid system avoided and food losses.
Initially the whole suburb was blamed out but then progressively restored. About half the neighbours or more were restored with an hour or so.
The Ausnet outage site stated 87 homes in the area without power this morning.
There was either a local phase out or Ausnet had selectively and arbitrarily shut off power at the meter to reduce demand on the system.
As more people shift from gas to heat pump, this problem may well emerge on very cold days .
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LV fuses blowing due to overloading were the primary cause of the majority of the outages. These fuses protect the larger system from overloading and worked as designed.
Would require a massive overbuilding of local distribution networks to mitigate these issues on extreme days.
Supply was fine, this time, and while there were a lot of local outages no major system failures yesterday. I think we were lucky.
20
The outages across Victoria are just making the news cycle. Apparently the triple-0 system lost power as well:
Victorian emergency call operators were left taking notes with pens and paper after a power outage knocked out the state’s computer-aided triple-0 dispatch system last night.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-15/software-failure-power-outage-affects-victoria-triple-0-response/105892758
You would think that a system like that would have an emergency power supply. How stupid would it be to have an emergency call centre that goes dark in a power emergency!!!!
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Just received the following msg in confirmation. Ours went off last night as it also did last hot spell. Hi this is AusNet, your electricity distributor.
Yesterday saw extreme heat and record demand on the power network – ten percent higher than our previously recorded peak. The huge demand meant safety protection devices activated to protect the community and broader network.
We understand the impact of not having power in extreme heat. Our crews worked through the night and continue today in order to get power back on.
We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience
10
During the recent fires in Victoria the township of Natimuk suffered a number of destroyed houses and other buildings. When the fire started the local mobile phone tower on Mt Arapiles lost power and its backup diesel didn’t activate. Same for the nearby fire spotting tower. All useless. Then the local CFA radio network went kaput. People fighting the fire (CFA and local residents/farmers etc) had to use their own UHF and at one stage messages were driven from one side of the fire to the other. It was a circus.
40
So-called RE was never going to work due to wind droughts and the impossibility of grid-scale storage, howeve the meteorologists didn’t issue wind drought warnings and the sponsors of wind farming didn’t bother to check the reliability of the wind supply. Like dirt farmers who never bothered to look at rainfall records.
Get wind and solar off the grid as quickly as possible.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/its-time-to-simplify-the-grid
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Displacement ain’t replacement.
60
SO TRUE!
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/renewables/21-7-intermittent-solar-and-wind-power-can-displace-coal-but-cannot-replace-it
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The Rudd-Gillard Labor Governments of 2007-2013 legislated for Renewable Energy Target of 32% and that was approximately what is recommended as the maximum for wind and solar installations installed capacity for a large electricity grid, and must have 100% controllable generators capacity back up support to deal with intermittent unreliable supply from the wind and solar systems. And of course subject to a cost-benefit analysis.
Albanese Labor raised the RET to 82% after May 2022, and not long afterwards that despite the transition away from fossil fuels underway that natural gas is now their preferred transition fuel for gas turbine generators, some already operating and more to be built as the so called renewable energy installations fail to replace the original mainly coal fired power stations and some hydro power stations.
State Governments have also realised that renewables are not satisfactory and never will be so always needed controllable generators back up, and after NSW compensated the owners of the largest coal fired power station, Eraring, to extend operating life by a couple of years the owners recently announced that without asking for funding they will now extend operating until 2029 and for further review. After repairs and maintenance completed Eraring is now considered to be a profitable asset for the shareholders.
The renewable energy and net zero emissions politics must be stopped. Repair the other coal fired power stations and build new power stations to replace the lost generator capacity of power stations that have been closed down, coal, gas and nuclear technology, The Coalition Dutton Plan retained existing systems and added seven nuclear power stations, five large capacity and two small capacity using existing power station locations and existing transmission lines.
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Yes. And, the lefty saboteurs in the Liberal Party chopped him off at the knees as a result. The Liberals are not the answer as long as their “Wets” are part of the Party.
41
Maybe Chris Bowen could “Holler Fer A Marshall”. Who remembers those iconic Marshall Battery ads where the young couple are stranded on the railway tracks on a pitch black night by a dead battery when they hear the warning whistle and see the lights of an approaching freight train. The ending is a happy one because after they “Hollered for a Marshall” the dead battery was rapidly replaced by the Marshall road service techo and they were able to get clear of the train. Saddly, I surmise that no amount of hollering is going to extend the capacity of clapped out Energiser Bunnies responsible for grid back-up batteries.
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As the disaster of wind and solar intermittent supply unfolds and that “firming” word is applied the list of expensive equipment is never published, and not often the feeder transmission lines from every installation location to the main transmission lines.
I recently heard a comment about synchronous condensers being installed to stabilise the grid as intermittent, unreliable supply fluctuates, to do what controllable large power station generators automatically do as they spin.
60
As I’d posted a few days back, The Age newspaper was bleating about how wonderful that South Australians renewable fantasy was progressing.
The SA miracle: How one Australian state leads the world on renewables
https://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/the-sa-miracle-how-one-australian-state-leads-the-world-on-renewables-20260122-p5nw5j.html
Paywalled, but why would you even want to read such biased propaganda? I did just to see what BS spin was in the article.
“100% for part of the day” how much was that “part of the day”, and how much did that free renewables truly cost?
Comparing SA’s renewable fantasy to Denmark is a red herring, Denmark, whose renewable systems is mostly hydro, not wind, solar and batteries like SA. Meanwhile Denmark continues to export their oil resources.
I’d also noted that not once did the article mention that SA has the country’s most expensive power prices. Today’s post just confirms that, and that it’s going to get worse. Meanwhile Blowing in the wind wants to get Australia to 82% renewables by 20230, is that also for just part of the day?
Of course, inflation continues to raise its ugly head. The true inflation figure was being gamed by Jim through the recent handouts of the power rebates that made inflation look less than it really is. That “free” $$$ rebates should never have been counted in the inflation figures, just the government gaming the system. The same as they continue to have “off the book” expenses, such as the NBN and Snowy 2. Gaming the system, nah, tell them they’re dreaming.
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And if we do indeed have a catastrophic outage, the government will double down and say we just need more renewables. They’re in too deep to make rational decisions.
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Grid scale batteries are a fantasy for the innumerate.
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The circumstances occurring yesterday highlights another emerging grid problem.
When people have essentially free energy, they can use a lot of it because it costs nothing. After installing their solar panels, batteries and heat pumps with only capital outlay and negligible operating cost, they get complacent about energy consumption. They set the thermostat and let the system respond.
Now some of those heat pumps are monsters. The one I have for reverse cycle is mid range and pulls 7kW. when running hard. Other near me have bigger units that will pull maybe 10kW or more when working hard. So you have 30kW battery and 10kW of solar panels and a load of 10kW plus other household items like oven. The Sun drops off in the afternoon and some of the demand comes from the battery. By 7pm there is not much sun or charge left in the battery. So the 10+kW demand now hits the grid maybe a bit later than all the other loads that have only solar panels or small battery. The skinny grid is then stressed as the demand hits record levels even worse if there is little wind.
What are the odds of having little wind power around 8pm at night?
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A friend has a two story home with ducted a/c, the compressor is an industrial 3 phase type, it’s on all day and night, powered sometimes through the day by a 6.6kw solar pv.
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Only one system? Some two-storey houses in Perth have two large air cons. My son had two large systems in a single-storey residence.
10
To a large degree, this is exactly what happened yesterday. Wait until 2 or 3 days at 40. It won’t be pretty as the batteries will run out sooner, and the load will increase much earlier.
10
Be aware that the WA grid would be down if the Goldfields grid was re-connected to Collie.
T’othersiders need to know that the mining coys took matters into their own hands to do their own thing.
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Kalgoorlie IS connected to the WA SWIS grid. Surprisingly, with an adequate and cheap gas supply, it only has 58MW of gas-powered backup if the single transmission line fails.
WA has a total of 7.2GW of power generation, when you include the NWIS grid and other mining and gas industry power generation.
10
This is what happens as South Australian renewable penetration reached 74% in the 2024 calendar year. Physics always triumphs over ideology.
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In a world where electricity is the new oil, Australia is running out. (paraphrasing TRT World)
10
Sadly, the “lucky country” is run by the technically illiterate and we must adapt to that. I advise everyone to purchase a 15kWHr battery to run one house circuit so they can maintain critical services ( refrigeration & IT gear).
A wealthy UK relative rents out his farm-house in Wales and to guarantee basic power during outages he installed a Tesla Powerwall 3. In Au they cost nearly $15k fitted but you can purchase a perfectly good LiFePO 15.3kWHr battery for $3k if you shop around. LiFePO batteries don’t do well being stored idle at 100% so the Powerwall 3 is programmed to 80%. Prior to a planned grid outage an internet signal can trip the battery to charge up to 100%. This sounds like an expensive black-out precaution but city holiday folk are not to be trusted with a petrol powered generator and without an internet connection or a cold beer from the fridge they rapidly sour and leave negative comments on Air B&B.
I have a battery which runs a fridge plus a few other minor items 24/7 so my battery rarely remains at 100% and is cycled down every night. I also have a set of Maxwell super-capacitors paralleled with the battery. They mop up electrons from solar panels very readily so can maximise a 10 minute sunny spell and deal with the high starting load of electric motors. The caps should lengthen the service life of the battery and can double up as a car jump-starter module.
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The following is slightly off-topic.
Meanwhile in the leafy suburbs surrounding the Kooyong electorate: the Doctor we all know as Monique wants to name the heatwaves in the same way we name Cyclones and Hurricanes. She obviously does not look at history of heatwaves in Victoria. And were the latest alarmist numbers taken from the same thermometers. Jo has reported on a number of occasions about the anomalies with the way measurements have been modified. What fools we have in our Parliament.
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Yes, it will have to get worse before it gets better, because then there will be no room for excuses any more. But when it happens, do make absolutely certain that those responsible have had their sticky fingers pried permanently from the levers of power.
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Worth opening a book on where it will happen first: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, Germany, California, New York.
It happened in Venezuela but for different reasons (and is coming in South Africa for the same reasons), and if Trump wants to be popular there then he could restore and make reliable the grid there.
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Hi Raquel,
Re my post at #6.1:
Thank you for finding and adding the links.
I did the post in haste, as I had an appointment to attend, but felt it important to indicate at the time that, in fact, the Iberian blackout did result in loss of life. I couldn’t remember then the specific link of Kathryn Porter’s blog posts, but I remembered that she didn’t report the loss of life until well after she posted the two links that you have posted. Later today I have had the time to follow up. She posted the relevant information in a much later post at:
https://watt-logic.com/2026/01/01/energy-security-threats-manifest/
Here is the relevant quote from it:
“ I have been criticised in the past for scaremongering when warning of the risks of blackouts, and that blackouts will lead to fatalities. Ten people lost their lives in Spain and one in Portugal due to the direct effects of the blackout (one death in a house fire linked to the use of candles, seven fatalities when backup generators powering ventilators failed, and three deaths when a backup generator powering a ventilator malfunctioned giving off carbon monoxide, poisoning the patient and two relatives). However later research found that “in Spain, mortality rose over the next two days (+167 deaths; 95% Credible Intervals: +28 to +300), particularly among women aged 85+. No clear excess was found in Portugal.”
In addition, the economic cost was significant with one estimate putting it between €2.25 – 4.5 billion.”
That said, the two posts which you quote are very important.
Might I suggest to such as “Gee Aye” that s/he, who delights in hiding behind a pseudonym,
might read the two posts which you quote. They are textbook classics as a description of the relevant electric power engineering. Here is my message to such as “Gee Aye”:
In future, do not presume for a moment that those of us who express concern about the state of the Eastern Australian grid are talking nonsense. What happened in Spain and Portugal on 28 April 2025 could happen in Eastern Australia at any time, particularly in South Australia.
You, “Gee Aye”, might also take careful note of what Ms Porter has to say in the link quoted above about the total inability of grid-scale batteries to deliver the equivalent of the absolutely necessary Synchronous Inertia.
My apologies, Raquel, for failing to provide the relevant link earlier and thereby causing you unnecessary trouble in having to find it/them.
That said, for anyone who needs to know how a high proportion of so-called “renewables” on a grid contributes to blackouts, these posts of Kathryn Porter’s are required reading.
Raquel, once again, thank you for taking the trouble to provide relevant links.
Paul Miskelly
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[Sorry I got the wrong links. Thanks for the extra info. – Raquel]
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Thanks for the extra info Paul. I had looked at Kathryn Porter’s earlier analysis with just the 11 deaths directly attributable to the blackout. It was from her – I think on the Triggernometry podcast – that I got the projection that it would be much worse if temperatures had been a lot higher or a lot lower. Like for Spain, these would be in the form of excess deaths which are notoriously difficult to estimate. But the more extreme the temperature at the time of the blackout, the greater the likely excess death toll. With the most vulnerable most at risk.
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Hi Paul. I am the actual Gee Aye who didn’t do any of the things you accuse the mythical “such as Gee Aye” of. Your concern is noted however there has not been a major outage. Me writing that is not a personal attack on you.
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All the while massive Data Centres are bounding up out of the ground like mushrooms around the place! A decent sized one like many in Sydney or Melbourne featuring 5, 6 or 7 mains supply incomers of 4000 Amps each, with provision for expansion. There are supply agreements being signed all over the place. They cannot afford to take any more rotating generation plant off the grid without facing some serious ramifications. I can see the grid, or parts of it at least, being re-nationalised just to maintain capacity, seeing the private operators are just running it into the ground making huge profits. Interesting times ahead…
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