The entire state of South Australia (1.7M people) lost power last night

abc.net.au

5 points·teapot01··4 comments

There is actually a whole political thing developing around this between renewable energy opponents and proponents. Ostensibly, the blackout was caused by a main transmission line (interstate feeder) being knocked over, disrupting frequency synchronisation, and activating failsafes.

However, because SA gets 40% of its energy from wind farms, it's now being suggested that having more local baseload capacity in the form of fossil fuels may have prevented this.

Ironically, the severity of the storm itself (it's being a called the worst storm in 50 years) is being blamed on climate change.

I guess we'll see what's true and what's not in due course.

Yep the Right wing has come out and blamed it on renewables, the left wing has blamed it on climate change and the centrists are just calling for blood.

The reality is with 22 Main transmission towers which feed the state collapsed in high winds, even additional coal/gas stations would not have saved the day. At the time of shutdown, wind energy was producing close to 1000MW, it was the loss of transmission towers that caused frequency events leading the National Energy Market operator to Isolate the state from the rest of the Country. The cascading safety systems then caused all generators to shutdown.

Reality is inconvenient when you're trying to score political points though.

Sometimes bad shit just happens and there's no one to blame.

and no one gave two hoots

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