As the Courier Mail tweets that 89,000 people in Townsville and Cairns are without power as TC Yasi approaches, I thought the following chart (taken from our ez2view application) might explain a bit of what that means:
Like everyone else, we will have to wait until tomorrow morning to know the full picture when daylight comes…
Paul was one of the founders of Global-Roam in February 2000. He is currently the CEO of the company and the principal author of WattClarity. Writing for WattClarity has become a natural extension of his work in understanding the electricity market, enabling him to lead the team in developing better software for clients.
Before co-founding the company, Paul worked as a Mechanical Engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in the early 1990s. He also gained international experience in Japan, the United States, Canada, the UK, and Argentina as part of his ES Cornwall Memorial Scholarship.
Thunderstorms impacted parts of South Australia electricity system in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with two syncons tripping and around 30,000 customers experiencing outages.
We watched with interest today as demand crept up in all mainland regions to the point where the NEM-Wide demand rose slightly above 33,000MW for the first time ever, during a summer period.
NSW experienced a record summer demand on Thursday 15th January, driven by high temperatures across the state. The extreme weather experienced in NSW followed the extreme weather that swept across South Australia and Victoria only two days beforehand.
1 Commenton "North Queensland Powers down with TC Yasi underway"
A lot of residential load was disconnected very early on Wednesday night (5:30pm where I live) when there wasn’t much wind yet. This would seem to suggest that the Ergon system really is quite fragile. I will need follow this up with Ergon once the dust has settled. With the rediculous hikes in prices they have been charging in recent years, I expect a corresponding improvement in service.
A lot of residential load was disconnected very early on Wednesday night (5:30pm where I live) when there wasn’t much wind yet. This would seem to suggest that the Ergon system really is quite fragile. I will need follow this up with Ergon once the dust has settled. With the rediculous hikes in prices they have been charging in recent years, I expect a corresponding improvement in service.