Broken Hill re-connected to the main grid (on temporary towers), overnight to Friday 1st November 2024 … a little earlier than expected

Received a couple of alerts from ez2view that have provided some head scratching overnight and this morning.

Amongst the information from ez2view

Two of the alerts we’ve seen (via the ‘Notifications’ widget in from ez2view) are captured below:

As noted in these alerts:

1)  The back-up diesel generator, that’s been supporting the Broken Hill and environs community these past ~16 days, was switched off on Thursday 31st October 2024 evening:

(a)  As seen, it was offline just prior to 20:16 (NEM time) yesterday evening

(b)  It’s a Non-Scheduled unit, so there’s no information provided by AEMO (because none is submitted) in bids and so on, so we don’t exactly know why

(c)  Based on a couple other experiences in recent days, we wondered if it was either:

i.  Planned maintenance

ii.  or a Forced outage

… but did not have time to check either overnight (though we did note this morning that there was no counter-alert to note the restart of the unit.

2)  Then at 06:41 (NEM time) we saw the surprising news that the Broken Hill Solar Farm had started its morning ramp this morning.

3)  Note that nothing yet from the Silverton Wind Farm (and we’d also switched off the alerting on the Broken Hill BESS as it had become quite active in recent days – albeit at low levels).

So this morning we opened up the ‘Trends Engine’ chart in ez2view to take a look back over the past ~20 days as follows:

Given that the battery is not running (and even perhaps if it were) my first guess was hat the reconnection to the main grid had happened overnight some time … so a little earlier than Penny Sharpe had telegraphed on Thursday morning.

Reporting elsewhere (at least to this point)

With the suspicion above, I began canvassing a few other places on the internet where there might have been further information…

From the Energy Minister

At the time of publication (~09:00 NEM time) there’s no further update on Penny Sharpe’s LinkedIn page;

… that’s proved to be one of the first places we’ve seen updates

From the Energy Department

On the NSW Government website at this address they are noting the following:

‘Power supply to Far West NSW was restored to the main NSW electricity system overnight. No further outages or disruptions related to this event are expected.’

… and …

‘Communities outside of Broken Hill experienced a brief outage while Essential Energy reconnected the Pinnacles Place Zone Substation to the main NSW electricity system.’

as shown…

From the TransGrid

TransGrid posted an update ‘Primary power supply restored to Broken Hill and NSW Far West Communities’ this morning which notes:

‘As of 8:41pm Broken Hill time (ACDT) 31 Oct, Transgrid confirmed the power line linking Broken Hill to the HV transmission network was energised.’

… so, 20:41 ACDT (i.e. local time in Broken Hill) was 20:11 NEM time – which, as noted above, was roughly when the Broken Hill diesel generator switched off.

A few next steps

Briefly speaking, here’s a few things still to come

Silverton Wind Farm still offline

As yet that is still offline … will look forward to seeing that restart.

Permanent Towers to replace the Temporary Towers?

The reconnection has been completed using ‘temporary towers’, which (as Dan Lee noted here) have been getting a bit of a work-out in recent years with eight separate transmission tower failure incidents in less than five years.

The permanent tower replacements will take a number of weeks still to deliver.

What happened, and why … and the inevitable finger pointing

Of course, there will be reviews of what happened and why.

Lessons Learnt

… let’s hope that there’s some clear and objective lessons learnt (in various dimensions) that will hold us in good stead for the future.