On September 28, 2016, South Australia went dark. It felt apocalyptic.
When I lived in the country (OK, the “peri-urban fringe”) blackouts were a regular occurrence. But by that spring I was living in the CBD. You can poke fun at Adelaide, but the CBD is usually a relative hive of light and sound. On that day it was spooky.
My office at The Advertiser had a sort of half-power from generators (enough to flush the toilets and see my colleagues) but as I headed home I was thinking of Mad Max, and zombies, and how to live without a charged phone. I could hear cars and ambulances but no ambience.
A cascading catastrophe had caused a statewide blackout, an event that was manna from heaven for the anti-renewables crowd. It’s the first time I remember hearing that facile humbuggery: “When the wind doesn’t blow, and the sun doesn’t shine…”
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Cursory research shows that phrase being used in various forms as far back as 2005. It’s now regularly deployed as a sort of untrue truism, to sketch a scenario whereby solar and wind are quite nice but not really up to the job of keeping the lights on.
A sweet plan, but a bit woke. Let’s have some muscular fossil fuels to back up this airy fairy renewables stuff — so the tone goes. It’s such a handy go-to caricature that, predictably, Prime Minister Scott Morrison wheeled it out when he announced his government’s plan to build a $600 million gas-fired power station.
“When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine you need a gas-fired power plant to make up that difference to keep the lights on and prices down,” Morrison said.
Fickle wind and sun! Prices down! Lights on! Entrance stage left, memorise the script, break a leg.
There are many sedimentary levels of sophistry and scat to dig through in the plans to prop up fossil fuels — just as the International Energy Agency says there should be no new investment in them if the world is to reach net zero emissions by 2050. And as Australia barrels towards COP26 without clear targets.
Why are the free-marketeers intervening in the market? Is there a risk we’ll run out of power? Did the Hunter byelection have anything to do with it?
And then there’s this infuriatingly obtuse fallback to the wind not blowing and the sun not shining, as though there’s not a blindingly obvious answer. Storage.
South Australia keeps being held up as a there-but-for-the-grace-of-fossil-fuel-gods example of the capricious nature of renewable energy. And that’s a dirty lump of coal-fired crock. SA went dark because of a clusterfuck of wild weather, bad communication, and operator error. Not because the sun failed to shine, or the wind to blow.
But that phrase will keep getting wheeled out, a tried-and-(not)true way to denigrate renewables and justify pulling moves to keep the right-wing reprobates happy.
Business — oh, and the international community — is moving swiftly ahead of the government on this.
We’re chained to the coal fondlers — for now.
The big question is when the actual looming apocalypse will assume enough importance to jettison the faux-apocalypse of South Australia’s one-day blackout.
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When the high voltage towers were demolished by high winds that night the power went off because the high voltage network did. The gas generators could have supplied the state many times over. And as for “when the wind don’t blow”, that night it was blowing like the clappers.
could “the gas generators have supplied the state” if the towers “were demolished” and therefore no transmission? Thank you Tory for reminding us clearly how the spin keeps on going!
How would any electricity generated by gas (or any other form of generation – including Fraudberg’s then hallowed coal/fossil fuels) have been able to be transmitted when the infrastructure for transmission was demolished?
Weatherill serving it up to the fatuous Fraudberg at that subsequent PR stunt/presser was a classic of how under-prepared for office Fraudberg is.
It wasn’t completely demolished.
The SA blackout may have been able to been avoided, to some degree, if the gas generators produced power.
As I remember it the initial damage caused the tripping of the system – and it was “funny” how those AMEO reports changed from the initial to the eventual “acceptable” fourth?
Transmitted how? By bucket? Horse & cart?
The grid (HV towers etc) is like roping together clumsy mountaineers – it may save one but potentially endangering everyone linked to them.
The grid (the poles & wires, taxpayer gold plated anticipating privatisation) was a political decision to centralise power (pun not intended) in as few centres as possible, in case they natives became too restive.
Nukes – see la belle France – ensure, nay demand, that centralisation and enforced security – guess who that benefits.
How exactly was this power going to reach homes when transmission towers had been knocked over?
That was only the first time you heard that phrase? Perhaps not surprising, since your “office at The Advertiser” was part of the sprawling Murdoch propaganda machine. I’m sure that, as an integral part of the machine, you “memorised the script”, “broke a leg” and sought to blame renewables for the SA blackout. You did, didn’t you?
This zine is supposed to be a brave truth teller, untainted by Moloch’s touch yet, at last count, it had 6 exNewsCorpse hacks on staff.
And it expects money for this?
How about we devise a mechanism where some LNP Election funds are used as guarantees in case electricity prices fail to fall as promised, or if a new gas-fired power station becomes a stranded asset, or if sourcing new gas by fracking causes expensive environmental damage….
I’m still waiting for my $500 electricity bill rebate after Abbott “axing the tax”.
Just last month, on Macquarie radio, the audio version of NewsCorpse, loyal myrmidon Nick Carter actually claimed that we’d all saved thousands since that atrocious vandalism.
Growing up in SE Queensland, blackouts were a regular occurrence, especially in the lead-up to elections. Premier Joh would regularly dish out some unsupportable condition that would make the power station workers go on strike, blackouts would inevitably follow, and bingo: a wave of umbrage would waft him back into power. Coal power, the lot of it.
Queensland had a major albeit short-lived black out because a coal fire power station exploded. Funny no one has mentioned it, and it wasn’t even old.
This was only a week ago. While it’s been met by mantras on the “need” for more coal and gas power, The LNP needs to be laughed to an early grave. That’s not going to happen but …
At Biloela, almost as if in divine retribution.
Except that the town opposed the Gestapotao’s bastardry.
Just glad that none of the hacks picked up the magic word “hydrogen” in the component that failed – imagine the scare stories that’ll come when a progressive party, should we ever find one under a rock, advocates for ‘green’ hydrogen from renewable energy.