Antinuclear

October 5, 2016  AS last week’s super-storm lashed South Australia, the state fell victim to not one but two major failures. The first involved electricity.Transmission towers bent like reeds in gale-force winds. A series of safety switches were tripped that isolated South Australia from the national grid. Wind generators which had been feeding in electricity until the failure were shut down.

This would have occurred whether the state was powered by wind, coal, gas, sunlight or any other technology.

A transmission infrastructure failure has never happened on this scale before, but the system worked exactly the way it is meant to. It shut itself down to protect equipment and consumers. Had it not done so, the damage would have been immense.

The fact that SA was not plunged into days or weeks of turmoil is testament to the organisation and hard work of the thousands of men and women — from linespeople and engineers to managers, traffic controllers and truck drivers — who worked tirelessly to get South Australia back up and running.

The second failure here, while less obvious, is far more alarming. It was the complete absence of leadership at a national level.

The government threw away the natural disaster playbook, which calls for calm and compassionate leadership. With 80,000 people still in darkness, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull went on the attack against the renewable energy industry — without any realistic basis for doing so.

For a state like South Australia, where renewable projects are a major economic driver picking up the slack caused by declining manufacturing and automotive industries, these comments were dangerous. They will scare investors, hurt businesses and kill jobs………

Mr Turnbull and Mr Frydenberg were playing to a very small audience of climate sceptics and fossil fuel enthusiasts, despite being on the national stage. They sought to do real and lasting damage to the people who work and invest in the renewable energy sector.

Had they listened to unbiased briefings from people with technical expertise, they would have known that the generation technology used would have no effect on the response of the network to transmission infrastructure failures.

They would know that in order to protect our electricity network from future events like this, we require a much greater investment in renewables than we currently have. One failsafe against catastrophic failures such as this one is distributed generation.

Where generation is linear, with large power stations feeding electricity into a grid that then distributes it to consumers, there are major pinch points that are vulnerable to natural disasters. But if we invest in significant small and medium-scale generation — solar farms, localised co-generation and battery storage for small towns and large buildings — then we are no longer so thoroughly dependent on the integrity of large-scale infrastructure for our power……...Allen Hicks is national secretary of the Electrical Trades Union.http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/allen-hicks-unfounded-criticism-of-renewable-energy-in-south-australia-will-scare-investors-hurt-businesses–and-kill-jobs/news-story/e50681f51e68729bc9b0e5839a17a0ea