- by John Hart
- The Guardian
- Issue #2123
A generator outside the local McDonald franchise in Broken Hills. The manager said it costs $1500 every 24 hours to run.
Severe storms hit Broken Hill at midnight 16 October. Winds were over 130km/hour, and there were over 130,000 lightning strikes per hour for 24 hours.
Seven transmission towers were destroyed in the storm, severing the connection of the region with the national power grid.
Our grid link is 220 MW, but the backup generator is 14 MW, 15 times smaller than the usual feed. We are told that there is enough rooftop solar to assist the generator to supply the town during daylight hours but more is needed to supply evening power when locals prepare meals and use air conditioning. The increased demand for energy exceeds the backup generator’s ability to provide, resulting in ‘load sharing,’ whereby parts of the town are disconnected from power for two to six hours. Residents were informed that power would be shut down for six hours every three days to allow maintenance on the only functioning generator.
The continued and random power outages have caused widespread losses in the hospitality, tourism, retail and food service sectors. Two popular restaurants have reported losses of $20,000 each in wasted food, forced closures, and loss of customers. Supermarkets have disposed of perishable items such as dairy and meat in excess of $10,000 a day until backup generators were installed.
Meals on Wheels lost all food in storage and could not deliver meals in the first few days of the outage. The elderly living at home struggled to find the toilet at night. Electronics such as fall sensors, security alarms, and cordless telephones stopped working. Several hundred residents suffer from sleep apnea, requiring power for CPAP units to maintain breathing during the night.
The mining industry halted operations on 16 October when the transmission lines collapsed. Local generation cannot supply the power needed for these operations. Miners and staff have been put on ‘standby,’ meaning no work or pay unless you have holidays owing. Smaller engineering and remote mining companies are on their own.
People are talking about a freak tornado causing the damage, but the elephant in the room is privatisation. Twenty years of government neglect and the selling of the transmission assets to private enterprises are the root causes of this mess. The transmission towers are raw steel, now rusted and corroded after over 20 years in the harsh outback climate. It was only ten or so years ago when high winds took down towers near Wentworth. This has happened before and nothing was learned.
Both emergency generators in Broken Hill are gas turbines, which are expensive to buy, maintain, and run. There was no urgency to repair the faulty unit last year; what could go wrong? As usual the service provider created a false economy. The ‘saving’ on delayed generator repairs has resulted in 57 more generators being connected at a huge cost, plus a daily fuel bill far exceeding the consumption of the failed gas turbine.
The sale of NSW transmission assets by the previous state government has resulted in the usual results of rent-seeking service providers. Their business model is: acquire the assets below actual value, extract maximum price for the service, avoid repairs and maintenance that would divert funds from profit, and evade responsibility when the savings come back to bite them.
