Approximately 110,000 South Australian households lost power last night due to a fault in an interconnector with Victoria.
Large chunks of Adelaide, the Barossa Valley, Port Pirie and the West Coast were without electricity for around three hours.
The cause of the interconnector failure is yet to be determined. During the incident, South Australia was isolated the National Electricity Market (NEM) grid.
“In this case, the loss of capacity from Victoria resulted in automatic load shedding to avoid wider issues,” said SA Power Networks spokesman Paul Roberts.
“Supply from Victoria is part of the mix of generation sources that meet our electricity needs.”
South Australia’s transmission network is connected to the rest of the NEM via the Murraylink and Heywood interconnectors.
According to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), total imports from Victoria represented approximately 14% of total South Australian electricity consumption in 2013/14, while net imports (total imports less total exports) accounted for around 12%.
While obviously an undesirable event, it was lucky (depending on your viewpoint) the incident occurred late at night rather than during peak times. But even though the load shedding occurred when it did, SA Power Networks says it was swamped with calls from electricity customers.
SA Power Networks operates a distribution network across South Australia, comprising thousands of kilometres of powerlines and hundreds of substations that deliver electricity to 850,000 customers.
It’s not often something like this occurs; but it does add to the attractiveness to solar owners of installing a battery system.
If an event such as this occurred during the day, most grid-connected solar owners would also be left without power along with their non-solar neighbours, as systems automatically shut down for safety reasons in order to prevent power workers from possibly being electrocuted while working on a fault.
However, with the new generation of home battery systems about to be unleashed upon Australia, during a blackout event storage-enabled households will automatically switch to battery power.
For solar owners considering battery energy storage; a good start is to determine if their solar panel system is battery-ready. For those who haven’t gone solar as yet, battery-ready systems are now available; enabling early participation in the energy storage revolution.
For those living in Adelaide’s CBD area, generous incentives to install batteries are available.
