We ask too much of turbines in a gale
of springtime fury, lonely crowd of teens
stood up long-limbed and naked, to prevail
against rage-storms of passion, wind that keens
to shatter or compel. They have their use:
like adolescents, windmills’ dance provides
blind power, strong desire, electric juice
all green as summer grass; fair Earth abides.
But plugged-in turbine-kids - when pressure peaks
in statewide gusts their raving, lawless surge
flips off the careful grid of rules that seeks
to balance and constrain their pulsing urge.
How then can windmills, driven, sublimate
their hot vibes without darkening the state?
original version;
We ask too much of turbines in a gale
of springtime fury, like a crowd of teens
stood up long-limbed and naked, to prevail
against rage-storms of passion, wind that keens
to shatter or compel. They have their use:
like adolescents, windmills’ dance provides
blind power, strong desire, electric juice
all green as summer grass - fair Earth abides.
But like exploited teens, when pressure peaks
in statewide hurricanes their lawless surge
flips off the careful grid of rules that seeks
to balance and restrain their massive urge.
How then can windmills, driven, sublimate
their impulse without darkening the state?
Inspired by the recent troubles in South Australia.
Having a little trouble critiquing this merely because -- as I'm sure you know -- it's bugger-all to do with the wind turbines and all to do with a once-in-a-century storm beating the crap out of power lines. Storms would have just as little regard for fossil fuel-generated electricity, regardless of which agency Barnaby Joyce is cuddled up to at the moment.
I am not sure about the volta on the recurrence of "teens". The connotation shifts but I am not convinced the shift is strong enough to support the turn, particularly as they're both resting on similes (the weaker, more needy cousin of the metaphor family). I won't speak to the misuse of "hurricanes" simply because this need not stand for the single event but may well translate into other situations. Well, that is if WA and Qld ever get over their affair with coal, since they're the states most likely to be subject to actual hurricanes.
I do like the rhymes here, especially use/juice, and the couplet is pretty cool.
(10-06-2016, 06:49 AM)Leanne Wrote: Having a little trouble critiquing this merely because -- as I'm sure you know -- it's bugger-all to do with the wind turbines and all to do with a once-in-a-century storm beating the crap out of power lines. Storms would have just as little regard for fossil fuel-generated electricity, regardless of which agency Barnaby Joyce is cuddled up to at the moment.
I am not sure about the volta on the recurrence of "teens". The connotation shifts but I am not convinced the shift is strong enough to support the turn, particularly as they're both resting on similes (the weaker, more needy cousin of the metaphor family). I won't speak to the misuse of "hurricanes" simply because this need not stand for the single event but may well translate into other situations. Well, that is if WA and Qld ever get over their affair with coal, since they're the states most likely to be subject to actual hurricanes.
I do like the rhymes here, especially use/juice, and the couplet is pretty cool.
The thing is, at high wind speeds the turbines run faster, which leads to higher frequency, which leads to grid collapse. Can be dealt with by disconnecting the power source but in SA's case half of their electricity comes from wind so when they did that and drew more power from the interconnecter with Victoria, it overloaded thr IC and caused it to trip. With generation in SA so low from other sources, the grid frequency crashed and caused the blackout.
AEMO will look into it and release all the racy details I'm sure.
The solution is a new interconnect or with NSW...
But...duke is a coal lover, 'tis a kniwn fact. Tsk tsk.
hmm... that's funny... Scotland's wind generators supply around 90% of the nation's energy needs, and I don't know if you've been there but it's a pretty blustery place. Big winds and all that. Also, for a country with about 1/2 hour of sunlight a year, PV panels are able to contribute pretty significantly to household energy needs. The problem is not the form of energy, but the infrastructure.
But that's a debate for another time and place. There's a sonnet here, remember?
(10-06-2016, 06:49 AM)Leanne Wrote: Having a little trouble critiquing this merely because -- as I'm sure you know -- it's bugger-all to do with the wind turbines and all to do with a once-in-a-century storm beating the crap out of power lines. Storms would have just as little regard for fossil fuel-generated electricity, regardless of which agency Barnaby Joyce is cuddled up to at the moment.
I am not sure about the volta on the recurrence of "teens". The connotation shifts but I am not convinced the shift is strong enough to support the turn, particularly as they're both resting on similes (the weaker, more needy cousin of the metaphor family). I won't speak to the misuse of "hurricanes" simply because this need not stand for the single event but may well translate into other situations. Well, that is if WA and Qld ever get over their affair with coal, since they're the states most likely to be subject to actual hurricanes.
I do like the rhymes here, especially use/juice, and the couplet is pretty cool.
The thing is, at high wind speeds the turbines run faster, which leads to higher frequency, which leads to grid collapse. Can be dealt with by disconnecting the power source but in SA's case half of their electricity comes from wind so when they did that and drew more power from the interconnecter with Victoria, it overloaded thr IC and caused it to trip. With generation in SA so low from other sources, the grid frequency crashed and caused the blackout.
AEMO will look into it and release all the racy details I'm sure.
The solution is a new interconnect or with NSW...
But...duke is a coal lover, 'tis a kniwn fact. Tsk tsk.
After a bit of research and viewing excerpts from the interim report, it appears @Achebe is essentially correct: two major wind farm transmission lines, which were otherwise functional, went out of sync within a minute, taking them offline and overloading the interconnecter as it tried to bring in enough power to run the whole state. So... with the proviso that the problem was phase and frequency rather than overwattage, the cause-and-effect are, ahem, close enough for poetry. FWIW, a gas-fired plant was used to reboot the SA grid and ten wind farms have been ordered to stay offline due to misbehavior during the incident. (Also because of distortions in pricing, but that's another large ball of wax.)
Thanks to both, particularly @Leanne for the advice on repetition and other weaknesses. Perhaps I can work the idea of excessive frequency into the edits... teenagers going at it like rabbits? Perhaps best not.
I'm actually more of a nuke lover but, like CO2, coal is the wrong enemy.
We ask too much of turbines in a gale
of springtime fury, lonely crowd of teens
stood up long-limbed and naked, to prevail
against rage-storms of passion, wind that keens
to shatter or compel. They have their use:
like adolescents, windmills’ dance provides
blind power, strong desire, electric juice
all green as summer grass; fair Earth abides.
But plugged-in turbine-kids - when pressure peaks
in statewide gusts their raving, lawless surge
flips off the careful grid of rules that seeks
to balance and constrain their pulsing urge.
How then can windmills, driven, sublimate
their hot vibes without darkening the state?
Many thanks, again, to @Leanne, particularly. This edit changes two of the three simile "likes" to metaphors (really just one extended metaphor). Plus adding a little cowbell and moving the cause closer to reality (failling off the grid due to phase and frequency mismatch... which causes a beat right before everything goes completely black).
Constrain (as in "constraint payments") fell in neatly - it keeps coming up in reading about trying to integrate subsidized/PC "renewables" into a functioning regional grid. As I understand it, wind "operaters" receive "constraint payments" whenever the power they produce (or might produce - they get paid for energy they don't produce at all, too) is rejected by the grid operator. Rejection as in exces to requirements, but also because its quality (phase/frequency matching or wobble) is too bad to admit to the grid; the ten SA wind farms ordered off the grid for misbehavior in the late blackout will apparently receive "constraint payments." This is, of course, nonsense. A power grid's purpose is to produce AC, not PC.
The idea of "constraint payments" suggests another analogy/metaphor with adolescents today (at least in the US). That is, everybody's supposed to be able to go to college, and get a loan to do it. This has some benefits, but in part and for many it's a "constraint payment" to keep them out of the labor force (off the grid) as much due to iffy quality as lack of work for them (excess to demand). Suggests free verse rather than a sonnet, being overtly political .
Just got my electricity back where I live - knocked out for over an hour by torrential rain perhaps entrained by Matthew.
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
To clarify: the farms with a ride through feature of 10 dips remained online. Interestingly, the AEMO itself did not know of his feature.
(10-28-2017, 07:32 AM)Achebe Wrote: 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
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.
I think this feature would be there in all plant. AEMO recommdended that the hyper-sensitive settings on several of the plants be changed, but that still leaves open the possibility of 11 dips occurring some day which will have the same effect.
I’ll check with my colleagues who have a background in EE and confirm.
Non-practicing atheist
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