We’ve already noted today that ‘‘Market Demand’ in South Australia falls to ‘lowest ever’ point on Saturday 19th October 2024’ … and that part of the reason has been because of customers off-supply (including the big loads at Olympic Dam) following storms on Thursday evening 17th October 2024.
Here’s two discrete updates we’ve seen on Saturday afternoon 19th October 2024:
(A) Some Customers returned to service
On the government website here for Department of Energy SA, we see ‘Far north power updates’ in particular noting:
‘Power has been restored to most homes and businesses in the affected area, other than Hawker and Leigh Creek.’
… more about this below.
A couple questions/observations:
(A1) What’s the status at Olympic Dam (and Roxby Downs)?
With apologies to the other locations that had (or still have) customers off supply, my particular interest is in relation to Olympic Dam. That’s because it’s a sizeable slice of South Australian electricity demand that’s normally on the grid.
Readers might like to refer back to the ElectraNet map I borrowed for this article on Thursday evening showing the three lines that AEMO noted initially tripped between 18:42 and 18:48 (NEM time). With that map in hand …
About Olympic Dam
In this Draft EIS from BHP in 2009 (relating to possible expansion of the site, it informatively notes:
‘Olympic Dam’s electricity requirements are currently met by two transmission lines:
(a) A 275kV tramnsmission line from Davenport delivers approximately 140MVA of power to the site (this adequately covers meets the existing 125MW maximum demand
(b) a 132kV transmission line off the national grid from Pimba, which is only used for standby capacity’.
Now, we know the proposed expansion has not (yet?) gone ahead, but I’m not aware of any major change on the site since this report was prepared, so we assume thinking of Olympic Dam as an ~100MW load is still valid.
About the community of Roxby Downs
In the department’s update (copied above) they note:
‘Roxby Downs
Power has been restored to Roxby Downs but note that intermittent outages may still occur.
Keep up to date with what’s happening around Roxby Downs on the Roxby Council’s official Facebook page.
Readers should note that the ‘power has been restored’ bit refers:
(a) to power connected from local diesel generators
(b) … but with the area disconnected from the grid for a number more days.
That’s what is noted in this update from Roxby Council on their Facebook page
About Prominent Hill
Let’s also not forget the Prominent Hill location (including the Prominent Hill mine, which is now also owned by BHP following the acquisition of Oz Minerals in 2023), which also has load that (I believe) is normally served from the NEM main grid, and so would also presumably be disconnected at this time?
This update from ElectraNet on 22nd October 2020 ‘New electricity infrastructure powering SA mines‘ suggests that the load consumed at (what was) OZ Minerals’ Prominent Hill and Carrapateena mine sites was also ~100MW.
(A2) DER, and Load Restoration?
Notable also is the note about customers ‘… being asked to turn off their solar systems to ensure power can be maintained as the generators will not operate with solar in the system’.
I wonder how these concerns will change in future, as the take-up of residential batteries also continues to climb?
(B) Clements Gap Wind Farm restarts
Yesterday we noted that ‘Clements Gap Wind Farm still offline, on Friday morning 18th October 2024’.
At that time, we configured an alert inside of the ‘Notifications’ widget in ez2view to notify us when the CLEMGPWF unit started back up. This has triggered at 13:31 (NEM time) on Saturday 19th October 2024 as InitialMW for the 13:35 dispatch interval:
Digging a bit deeper, we choose the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view (filtered for CLEMGPWF) to see the past two days:
With respect to comment about Prominent Hill – both Prominent Hill and Carrapateena Mines are supplied from a separate 275 kV transmission line ex Davenport, and not the same 275 kV line that normally supplies the load to Olympic Dam (also ex Davenport) – ie there are 2 275 kV lines / 2 completely separate systems, so I’d assume both Carrapateena and Prominent Hill mines are still connected and operating as normal.