Battery storage may well have smoothed out those bubbles, according to a report last week from Lloyds Register and RES.

Engie’s Mintaro diesel generator’s emergency back-up tripped after just five seconds due to a fault, rendering it useless…Origin Energy’s Quarantine gas-fired power station also failed, AEMO said, due to different switching procedures used by ElectraNet. Attempts to use Quarantine were eventually abandoned and the operator had to wait unto the Heywood Interconnector could be restored and provide power to restart the generators at AGL’s Torrens Island units…Over at Port Lincoln, at the other end of the grid, Engie’s diesel generators did not do much better. They fired up after the blackout, and worked for just a few hours before two of them tripped and the other had to be taken off-line due to frequency issues.. ..Numerous attempts to get them to work failed. Power in the areas was not restored for nearly another two days before the transmission line could be fixed.

AEMO should be given credit for getting the grid back up and running in the time it did, given the failure of the gas and diesel plants at both ends of the grid…But by that time, just about everything that could go wrong, had gone wrong.

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