Monthly Archives: September 2016

Power of nature plus September wrap-up

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I posted yesterday about the South Australian superstorm and outage. See also No, Renewable Energy Didn’t Cause South Australia’s Blackout.

An industry expert, who preferred we didn’t give his name because he wasn’t authorised to speak on the matter, was even more blunt. He actually laughed when we asked if renewable energy was to blame for the blackout.

“The transmission network was taken down by a violent storm. No generation technology can transmit power without the transmission network. You could replace all sources of generation, but if 22 transmission lines are knocked down, it can’t transmit,” he told HuffPost Australia.

“When people attack renewable energy, sometimes there is an element of truth. In this instance it is flat out wrong, there’s no ambiguity whatsoever. It’s so clear what the cause was. It doesn’t matter what was generating the power, it’s not even relevant. The transmission lines can’t transmit anything if they’ve fallen down.”

Two more pics:

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Amazing stuff!

Blog stats for September 2016

This blog has averaged 42 visits a day in September, best since April 2016. Most visited in the month have been:

  1. Home page / Archives 673 views in September
  2. All my posts 29
  3. Outnumbered, Merlin, and other recently seen TV 23
  4. Tom Thumb Lagoon 21
  5. What do you know about the Indus civilisation? 16
  6. Random Friday memory: 1 – John Mystery, my brother, Illawong 14
  7. Ziggy’s House of Nomms 12
  8. 14 September 1989 and related memories 11
  9. Wollongong High: more on the centenary 10
  10. The swimmer 8
  11. Sorry, John Howard, but you’re not great on TV… 8
  12. How indigenous are you? 7
  13. Five (of many) decent Australians… 7
  14. My former workplace in the news today 7
  15. About 7
  16. Just a simple 70-something old patriot, me… 7
  17. 1957 or MCMLVII 7
  18. Wollongong High’s centenary, my family history, WW1 7
  19. Swamped by revenants? 7
  20. Shakespeare and footy tipping 7

South Australian superstorm and outage

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Yesterday a superstorm led to a total power failure in the entire state of South Australia. Think about that:

320px-South_Australia_locator-MJC

australia-and-europe

See SA power outage: how did it happen?  One element some have raised is the fact that South Australia relies more than other states at the moment on renewable energy.

Key points:

  • South Australia has the highest rate of renewable energy in Australia
  • The ‘one in a 50 year’ weather event ‘couldn’t have been prevented or foreseen’
  • SA to be an example for other states and territories when planning for significant weather events

So, maybe not.

Earlier this week, the Grattan Institute released a report detailing the pressure high uptake in renewables had put on the state’s wholesale power prices, and how it was being viewed as a test case for the rest of the nation.

But the report’s author, Tony Wood, said the blackout was as a result of a particularly violent storm and it was usual for a system to shut down to protect itself from further damage.

“My understanding, at least at the moment, is there’s no evidence to suggest these two issues are related,” Mr Wood said….

Mr Wood said the investigation into exactly what happened would help other states and territories plan for significant weather events hitting power infrastructure, even though South Australia’s network was quite different.

“South Australia itself is a more concentrated grid city network than say, for example, Queensland which is more strung out.

“You could imagine a situation in which a city in Queensland, such as Townsville and Cairns could have been affected by a similar freak storm, which took out all the power in that city, it doesn’t necessarily mean that would cascade through all the way down to Brisbane.

“These systems are designed with a lot of redundancy, a lot of protected systems. At the end of the day, the main issue is to ensure the safety of people and the safety of the system is protected by the system itself automatically shutting down.”

We haven’t heard the last of this though.

7884738-3x2-700x467 Image of South Australian storm by Erik Brokken — on ABC News

More 1950s Shire nostalgia

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Yes, of course I saw The Debate yesterday…

Meanwhile, I see New Scientist is currently offering this:

Wistful thinking? Why nostalgia can be good

Endless movie remakes. Throwback Thursdays on social media. Politicians who seem to want to turn back the clock to a vaunted era. While nostalgia seems harmless, and perhaps a bit mawkish, it turns out to be a powerful motivator of all that is good and bad in humanity. Find out how nostalgic you are through our special test, and understand the influence of wistfulness on our lives…

Looking at a couple more photos from the Sutherland collection (see the previous post), I saw this shopfront in Kirrawee in 1955:

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Hey, I don’t remember that! However, note what appears to be a pasted over phone number LU 1970. That’s the Beverly Hills office of D W Sproule and this, DWS Building Service, was at the time my father’s business.

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See my post Random Friday memory 13 – Humber Super Snipe. I don’t recall that Kirrawee office at all, but I studiously avoided much interest in my father’s businesses for years. It may however explain how we came to be living in Avery Avenue Kirrawee from 1956-1958. By 1959 we were in Jannali.

See Random Friday memory 30: spotting the Pardalote and Random Friday memory 24: riding the red rattler.

Now I mentioned Jannali, and another photo in the Sutherland collection brought back an almost completely faded memory from 1956: the goods train derailment of April 1956. Here is Jannali Station:

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And the story:

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I would have been one of those bussing it to Hurstville from Sutherland at that time. I am pretty sure I went, probably with my grandfather Christison who lived near the Jannali-Sutherland line, to have a look.

Someone who later worked at Jannali Station posted this:

The real peculiarity about Jannali Station was, (and still is) if any passenger did want to go from one platform to another, they had to exit the railway property area and walk through the council footpaths and parks, and then over a road bridge to the other side. (a very long detour) No railway steps to walk over as a short cut. Us rail workers had the convenience of the “boardwalk” across the railway tracks, but it was with a lot of caution. A lot of trains coming from Sutherland going top speed of about 70kmh (non stop) used to come tearing through the cutting and appear “out of nowhere” I witnessed a couple of close calls which were too close for comfort.

I was then in Second Year (Year 8) at Sydney Boys High:  More “Neil’s Decades” –8: 1956 — 1 and 1957 or MCMLVII. So my final nostalgic photo concerns what I would see every morning at Central’s Eddy Avenue, thanks to this blog.

EDDY AVENUE TRAMS

In 1955, being then just 4 feet 8 inches tall, I remember lying on those tram tracks to prove to a friend that the gauge was 4’8.5’’, the standard railway gauge. He thought tram-tracks were narrower.