Blackout fears prove our living standards are slipping

When NSW Premier Chris Minns asked Sydney residents to switch off appliances on Wednesday, he confirmed that the electricity system we’re building won’t do that.

Immediately after calling for businesses and households to avoid using energy intensive appliances from 3pm to 8pm, he gave a simple explanation: “The reason for that is that solar production in the energy market starts to come off from 3pm, at exactly the same time as people return from work.”

It’s staggeringly simple. Our demand for energy doesn’t follow the sun. And now we’re being asked to make it so. There couldn’t be a clearer admission that our living standards are being degraded: we’re being asked to use less of something at the times when we need it most.

The efforts to shield the current government’s narrative from such uncomfortable realities has revealed a number of awkward contortions of fact and logic.

The first is about the extremity of the weather. In parliament on Wednesday, Energy Minister Chris Bowen provided an update saying NSW is undergoing a “lengthy and severe heatwave”.

On Wednesday, the highest temperature in Sydney was 38C in Penrith. That’s a hot day, but not extreme. On January 4, 2020, Penrith reached over 48C.

Others areas in Sydney mightn’t have noticed that it was a “heatwave” if the media wasn’t harping on the term with the blackout warnings. The CBD only briefly exceeded 30C, reaching 32C at 11am. Tuesday and Thursday in central Sydney were mild days, in the mid-20s.

The need to overplay how extraordinary the weather was is betrayed by comments made by the Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Daniel Westerman on Tuesday: “Effectively that is a summer heatwave while we are still here in spring”. That’s true technically, but summer starts next week. A hot day in late November is hardly unseasonal.

Westerman continues with a clue about what really happened: “It’s pretty normal that both ­generation and transmission use periods in autumn and spring to undertake maintenance activities.”

A spreadsheet of generator availabilities published by WattClarity sets the scene and throws some light on AEMO’s comments. Three of the state’s 12 coal units were unavailable due to planned maintenance, not unforeseen failures. Two of these are meant to be back online before December 1, with the final one ready on December 3. For the rest of December all generators are expected to be available.

The truth is we were caught short of energy because the weather didn’t quite obey the calendar demarcation between spring and summer. Someone in charge of planning misjudged the appropriate maintenance window by one week.

No wonder we’re being asked to believe that a hot day in late spring is extremely unseasonal. The portrayal of the coal fleet as being some wobbly clutch of clunkers that are teetering on the edge of collapse is a severe misrepresentation of the truth.

One unit was unavailable due to forced outage. But three were getting the maintenance they need to ensure reliable power in the summer. Without them, as we’ve seen from this week, our energy system is made precarious and vulnerable. No energy system is available 100 per cent of the time. Maintenance is needed routinely, and breakdowns occasionally happen.

But the difference between a thermal generator and wind or solar is that the majority of the outages – for maintenance – can be scheduled so it doesn’t happen all at once. Unforeseen accidents are rare and a modest degree of redundancy can ensure reliability of such a system.

This week was a perfect illustration. We had one unit break down, but the real failure was assuming that the weather would be more predictable than it was, and mis-planning maintenance.

With wind and solar, none of the output can be known more than a couple of days in advance. And instead of being able to build in redundancy, and turn one generator on when another turns off, the inherently correlated nature of weather events means that all generators experience the worst shortfalls (and surpluses) at the same time.

Many of the proposed solutions to this underlying reality don’t pass their first brush with real world circumstances.

Batteries provided 0.2 per cent of our energy in the 48hrs to 5pm on Thursday. Heatwaves don’t produce consistent solar at the times when it’s needed.

On Wednesday at 5.30pm, rooftop solar met just 5 per cent of NSW demand. At noon, it was 31.5 per cent. Demand peaks when we change spaces, such as arriving home to a hot house after school or work, and getting the airconditioner to cool the living room. That’s when solar fades.

The solution we depended on to combat this crisis was to ask industry to power down. As confirmed by Bowen, the Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader – or “RERT” – scheme succeeded in finding an industrial load that would stop work for a fee to avoid the risk of blackouts.

This is a sign of things to come. We can control our lifestyle and our industrial loads in response to the weather. But this is not a desirable approach or outcome. If we don’t want the weather to increasingly impact what we do and when in our homes and factories, we should aim to build an energy system that isn’t completely dependent on it.