Broken Hill has been supposedly led into th promised land of renewable energy by the power company Transgrid, who thought it would be a grand idea, in the name of sustainable energy, for the town to have its own microgrid. The town's two emergency diesel generators were put in metaphorical mothballs. But a windstorm brought down some supporting transmission towers. There were still the two backup generators, but, according to the mayor Tom Kennedy:
"There was only one generator that was put under extreme amount of load," Mayor Kennedy told 7.30.
"Once that was put under load, that also tripped out and we were in a situation where some people in town were without power for 48 hours, others just over 24 hours.
"It was really lack of maintenance on generators that are worth probably $50 million each."
Hence 20,000 people were left without power and the mines had to shut down. That was not very sustainable. The Daily Sceptic has the meat of the story, but the main point here is the extreme vulnerability renewables create, and that zero net is simply an illusion:
"To describe the Silver City's experience as a setback for Bowen's dream of turning Australia into a nuclear-free clean energy superpower would be an understatement. Broken Hill was the renewable energy industry's Potemkin Village, the recipient of $650m of green investment and the proposed location for the world's biggest advanced compressed-air energy storage plant.
In 2018, Broken Hill City Council announced its goal to become Australia's first carbon-free city by 2030. Three years ago the Mayor at the time, Darriea Turley, welcomed the announcement that AGL was proceeding with plans to build a grid-scale battery, which the company claimed would be a reliable backup power source for 10,000 homes.
"This is a great opportunity for Broken Hill and renewable energies," Turley told the ABC. "What they will see is when there is an outage, the battery would click into operation."
AGL had badly misled Turley and her fellow councillors. When the storm hit at about midnight local time on Wednesday, October 16th, the battery clicked offline, not on. The town sat in darkness for several hours until the single operating backup diesel generator could be turned on.
A $41 million battery!
AGL was not prepared to keep a $41m battery fully charged, primed for that just-in-case moment. The battery was dispatching power into the national electricity market from early evening on the day of the storm.
The battery was offline for more than eight days while it was reprogrammed to feed into the local grid and recharged with rooftop solar and diesel. Silverton and the Broken Hill solar plant did not resume operation until the region was reconnected to the grid last Thursday. Turley's successor as Mayor, Tom Kennedy, was pictured wielding a shovel at the soil-turning photo-op for the battery in November 2022. He told the ABC the battery closely aligned with the council's desire to see the Silver City at the forefront of renewable energy and energy storage.
Tom Kennedy's changed his tune now:
Last week he told Chris Kenny on Sky News, "There's no way that renewables at this time are capable of supplying Broken Hill… The reality is it's not consistent power. You don't have that baseload power, so for Broken Hill it's almost useless."
The principal lesson from Broken Hill is that a stable, consistent baseload supply produced by rotating turbines is essential for stabilising the grid's frequency and underwriting fluctuating demand. Converting DC power from wind and solar to synchronised AC current becomes harder the more renewable energy is put into the system.
Not everyone has been as quick as Kennedy to wise up to the monstrous deception the renewable energy industry practised. Last Monday, Australia Institute Research Director Rod Campbell appeared before a Parliamentary committee on nuclear power to argue for the rapid phasing out of fossil fuels, "which is what climate science demands". Nuclear power was a distraction, he claimed.
Campbell's testimony involved insisting nuclear power was too expensive while admitting he had no idea how much a renewables-only plan would cost. "I haven't researched that."
Tellingly, the Australia Institute posted a video of Campbell's testimony on YouTube, suggesting it wasn't aware that he'd made a clown of himself. The anti-nuclear left is immune to contrary facts, paying homage to "the science" while disregarding the laws of physics, urging us to abandon fossil fuels by this time tomorrow while never once considering the constraints of engineering.
Is this a sign of things to come for Britain? Yes, but with the proviso that the costs will be astronomically higher, the consequences and complications of the engineering issues magnified, and the political fallout utterly catastrophic when people start discovering they have to sit in the dark, eat cold food out of lifeless refrigerators and shiver through a winter's night.
The Broken Hill experiment shows that Net Zero is pie in the sky where pigs fly. We can make plenty of use of renewables but 100% will never happen bar some unforeseen technological revolution. Certainly not by 2030.