Adelaide Spring [Edit]

[dukealien]

Thought I’d clear the air on this one.
The AEMO (system operator) concluded long ago that wind intermittency was not the issue here.
To summarise, tornadoes and gale force winds caused three transmission lines to trip that led to six successive voltage dips in quick succession on the network.
Wind farms in SA are designed to disconnect after a pre set number of voltage dips over a 2 minute interval. This varied from 10 to 2 (page 43 of the attached PDF)
So faced with 6 voltage dips some 456 MW of wind generation disconnected. This led to a huge surge of power through the interconnector with Victoria which then caused the interconnector to trip, leaving SA with an islanded system and a blackout.
Wind power had nothing to do with it, storms did.
AEMO modelling showed that if the 3 transmission lines had not fallen, the day would have gone on as usual.
Renewables rule.

Ref pages 6,8 and 47 of the report: https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/El...r-2016.pdf

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To clarify: the farms with a ride through feature of 10 dips remained online. Interestingly, the AEMO itself did not know of his feature.

Interesting.  Questions which come to mind include (1) did the normal [coal-fired] generating plants the wind turbines replaced have this dips-to-lockout feature, and, if not, (2) what was its purpose for the wind turbines?  Speculating, some possible reasons were, (a) incorrect assumption that, if dips were detected, the wind turbines were causing them, or (b) dips endangered the wind turbines - for example, by continuing to turn and burn with no place for the resulting EMF to go.  The ride-through (or, for counts of less than 10, anti-ride-through) feature may have been intended as a fail-safe:  nothing fails harder than a fail-safe operating to shut down life support.