There have been the rare cases of load shedding, usually when thermal generators are unexpectadely offline (one a few years ago was when a coal plant actually blew up).
Our power is very reliable and rarely goes out. Every few years a car hits a pole or something and we get a brief period of quiet time
I actually had some electronics fail quite recently after a number of minor outages and speaking with insurance they were saying it's very common in certain areas where the infrastructure is aging or has recently been struck by lightening.
I have noticed the operating voltage in the inner north seems to vary between as low as 217V to 246V, but it's quite frequent you notice the lights dimming in houses round here. I don't think there were any last summer (if you could call it a summer) but usually I'd experience 2-5 (ish) complete outages on hot days, when I spoke to someone in know they said this is normal as they load shed you can experience short outages.
Outages are almost always due to faults in the local distribution network.
AusNet owns & maintains the transmission network in Victoria, but it is under the operational control of AEMO.
Dispatch of generation and FCAS instructions is NEM-wide and the responsibility of AEMO.
Power outages happen, but I've been through maybe half dozen in my time here.
Same with brown outs. Not unheard of but far from common.
Although I spend my days at the office so maybe I miss some things, but equally I get an email if my home UPS activates and that has happened perhaps twice.
The Australian grid is at the forefront %age of renewable energy in the grid. This brings new challenges with it to which the answer is more batteries and more wind and solar.
Is that when entire states power (2gw) went from being produced to being consumed as a massive electric motor to 50k rpm and shooting into sky?
Doesn't seem like a thing in at least the capital cities.
It's very rare to see the load shedding applied/recommended. Are you sure it's not just the local part of the grid being crap?
When I was living in Melbourne (inner western and eastern suburbs) from roughly 2019 through to 2022 it wasn't.
From memory South Australia has had multiple occasions of being 100% powered by renewables with all their fossil generators shut down.
Yeah we definitely have work to do in completing the shift away from coal. The natural gas export contract situation is a shambles which makes it difficult to use for the transition as planned. It’s certainly not doom and gloom, though, and apart from lines getting aced by trees falling during storms, the wall holes are always full of electrons at my place.
So even on last Saturday when "operational demand" in South Australia reached the ballpark of -200MW (that is, rooftop solar generation was exceeding the demand in the state by 200MW), there was still 80MW of gas in the mix. (The excess was being exported to Victoria).
Edit: okay, maybe not at the other end of the continent. But then you have an insufficient grid and need to invest in that too.
In fact, if the cause is insufficient generation capacity then renewables will exacerbate it because fossil fuels are much more energy dense and consistent.