I think you'll find half a paragraph is quite a bit more than your assertion of 'not a single line' so how about accepting that you were wrong and moving on?

The AEMO media release about the incident directly attributes the issues to the storm damage but don't let the facts get in the way of your word salad rant. https://aemo.com.au/news/updated-heatwave-conditions-in-victoria

The AEMO is not the ABC and the ABC didn't accurately report the source of the problems, nor the consequences.

The ABC attributed it to storm damage. AEMO attributed it to storm damage. How many straws are you left clutching?

It's not the full story, The Australian carried the full story.

The Australian carried the full story except for the bit about the interconnector being damaged by a storm which caused the outage.

The Australian covered that incident at Cressy but it wasn't the full story. The SA/VIC inter-connector tripped out because it was suddenly overloaded, no mention of that on the ABC. Also no mention of the fact that VIC was load-shedding at that point and the storm at Cressy actually helped with that because it made the decision for them about who to black out.

Please give it up, you're just making yourself look more and more foolish.

I think you'll find half a paragraph is quite a bit more than your assertion of 'not a single line' so how about accepting that you were wrong and moving on?

The AEMO media release about the incident directly attributes the issues to the storm damage but don't let the facts get in the way of your word salad rant. https://aemo.com.au/news/updated-heatwave-conditions-in-victoria

The AEMO is not the ABC and the ABC didn't accurately report the source of the problems, nor the consequences.

The ABC attributed it to storm damage. AEMO attributed it to storm damage. How many straws are you left clutching?

It's not the full story, The Australian carried the full story.

The Australian carried the full story except for the bit about the interconnector being damaged by a storm which caused the outage.

The Australian covered that incident at Cressy but it wasn't the full story. The SA/VIC inter-connector tripped out because it was suddenly overloaded, no mention of that on the ABC. Also no mention of the fact that VIC was load-shedding at that point and the storm at Cressy actually helped with that because it made the decision for them about who to black out.

Please give it up, you're just making yourself look more and more foolish.

Have you got a non News Limited source for your continued assertion that the interconnector tripped before the storm damage?

don I said back at the start of this, a small engine etc will keep a 40' container frozen from Bordertown to Melbourne and until such time that it's loaded onto a boat, it's not rocket science.

So if your life or living is dependent on electricity as has been shown back a few posts, it certainly doesn't cost the earth do achieve this your self. So be furious and outraged but that won't help with the electricity supply when there is a very simple solution.

Yes the Govt or power company's should provide us with this in this day and age but that is not always the case. As they should provide a fast and reliable train system but that isn't the case either, hospitals/ health same.

Some of those we have no control over at all but the electricity we can over ride the system and provide our own, if we choose to do so. Sitting on your hands and going off the planet about what the Govt should be doing won't solve anything. Obviously you have to look after your self because nobody else will.

BigShunter.

Ever since Kennett privatised the lot, successive Victorian Premiers seem to have believed that they had no obligation to ensure adequate power supplies available to meet the inevitable growing demand.

It's a combination of privatised power gouging a captive market and the complete mess that 'green' energy sources have been making of the grid and the concept of reliable supply.

I think Brenton has every right to be furious - I felt exactly the same way after the blackout we had here in 2016 that was exclusively due to overloaded wind farms although they did everything they could to try and bury that cause. Now the poor long-suffering grid captive South Australian residents such as myself have to pay $1,600,000,000 to build yet another transmission line to NSW in order to try and shore up our capacity during times that our rubbish wind-towers and solar inputs can't meet demand or are knocked out of action and so we don't need the $300,000,000 worth of diesel generators that Weatherill bought to back-up the grid any more.

NONE of this would have happened if South Australia's only coal-fired power plant - Playford at Port Augusta - was still supplying us with cheap and reliable power. Honestly, who on earth would want to be running a business in South Australia OR Victoria - we have between us the highest domestic electricity charges in the world and we can't even manage to keep the lights on all the time.

AEMO report that overall reliability of power supply to the grid in Australia - note, not power supply to consumers - was 99.8% over the last 2 years and in SA it was 100%. The overwhelming issue re power interruptions to customers is network outages.
My understanding re the 2016 blackout in SA was the initial failure of the main transmission towers. This immediately lead to a situation where a) more wind turbines were called upon to supply the shortfall and simultaneously b) the % of power required from frequency stable sources dropped below the critical level. The way the grid was set up at that stage required the wind turbines to be immediately taken out of the supply side. Hence the black out.
The solution was to construct and commission the battery in the mid north. This can supply frequency stabilisation in nano seconds (cf up to minutes under the old system) and has saved consumers many millions of $ since commencing operation.  In addition, my understanding is that measures have now been (are being) taken to ensure more wind turbines can supply frequency compliant power.
BTW, SA is a net exporter of power, mainly but not only, to NSW. It also has the lowest power generating costs, excluding gas.
With a national grid, it is to a large extent irrelevant where power is being produced, as long as the distribution grid is reliable

Serious question, do you run your own business? Is is your hard earned that will be spent on this "cheap insurance"?

Is it you who will be making the choice between taking the fam on holidays or spending the little you have managed to save in a tough year on a generator?

Like I say a serious question. Not just for you but for anyone who thinks that small business people are millionaires who can just pop on down to the local Lyal Eales and fork out for a generator on a whim.

A number of insurance companies have begun to work with businesses across the spectrum to purchase generators, solar panels and/or battery storage, as they see it as beneficial. So, that they don't need to pay out a premium every time the power goes out for whatever reason.

Looks like another 9000 customers in Central Vic lost power yesterday afternoon at around 4 PM. This was a separate outage to the one that took around 5000 customers in Castlemaine, Chewton and surrounds out for 5 hours in the morning and into the early afternoon.

Not sure if this was load shedding or a fault, the estimated restoration time is around the time that they expected peak demand to ease.

https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/6607426/thousands-without-power-as-people-asked-to-reduce-usage/

Have you got a non News Limited source for your continued assertion that the interconnector tripped before the storm damage?

I never specified event sequences... EDIT: Actually it was in fact mentioned in that Australian except I posted as Jack mentioned above - forgot about that detail. Anyway...

I'm totes bored of this discussion now and let's just beg to differ on the details and agree that the grid didn't have any redundancy for what happened with the tower collapse at Cressy. Decades on from having a national electricity market it still doesn't work properly during critical events.

As Brenton said more blackouts revealed in VIC today - but as Vinelander says if it's not happening in Melbourne then I guess it's not happening.

AndrewR: Ultimately the AMEO blamed the operators of the wind farms themselves for the blackout, not the storm-damaged transmission line in the mid-north - discussed further here - (ABC). But its a bit of a semantic con job really because it was the reliance on wind - which at that moment was operationally disabled itself by the storm conditions - that basically caused the problem. The battery does go some way to ameliorating the problem by cutting in where there are overloads and spikes but otherwise it dosen't give any meaningful supply to South Australia and probably won't matter that much if there's another event like the one that happened in September 2016.

The problem occurred during the day on Friday, well beyond the last edition of The Age for that morning.  The Age does not have an afternoon or evening edition, so it's a bit unfair to claim that The Age did not cover the story.  There's an article about it on page 4 of today's edition (Saturday).

Power lines are out in Western Victoria due to a storm.

Portland Smelter is out cold without power.

The Smelter is still 2/3 alive. It is being fed from S.A. and Mortlake Gasfired Power Station at the moment.

The inter-connector tripped out so the whole plant lost power eventually. Big $$$ to re-mediate.

Portland’s owner, Alcoa, confirmed the outage.

“At approximately 2:20pm on 31 January, Portland Aluminium smelter lost power to both potlines due to a fault external to the plant. The cause of the fault is currently unknown,” an Alcoa spokeswoman told The Australian.

Correct, the Inter-connector tripped at approximately 1420 E.D.T.

Then at approximately 1600 E.D.T. Six 500kV Transmission Line Towers fell over North of Cressy on the MTS-HTS Line, isolating Portland from Eastern Vic.

By the time I posted at "2020-01-31 20:54:10" the Inter-connector had been restored, and Mortlake was fired up, thus allowing Two out of the Three Potlines at Portland to be switched back on.

The Smelter is limping on, and it is rather, touch and go at the minute. If the can get a tempory set of Towers in place, which will take approximately six days, without losing Power again, they might be able to survive. If not, then it is all over red rover.

Then at approximately 1600 E.D.T. Six 500kV Transmission Line Towers fell over North of Cressy on the MTS-HTS Line

The AEMO press release about the Cressy damage was at 1530 EDT so the damage must have happened some time before that.

Ever since Kennett privatised the lot, successive Victorian Premiers seem to have believed that they had no obligation to ensure adequate power supplies available to meet the inevitable growing demand.

The rot set in once the Kirner ALP State Government sold the Loy Yang B station in the early 90s, and the Kennett Liberal Government subsequently broke up the whole generation, transmission and retail of power. Since the mid 90s Victoria no longer had the SEC, which had responsibility for planning and introduction of new power stations - brown coal, gas or wind. After that time we have been completely exposed to retaining ancient stations like Hazelwood (which would have been retired years before the 2017 closure under SEC ownership). What we have now is total market failure - the State Government is out of the game and instead of a retail competition bonanza, Victorians have dozens of power retailers whose bills require a PhD to comprehend.

Ever since Kennett privatised the lot, successive Victorian Premiers seem to have believed that they had no obligation to ensure adequate power supplies available to meet the inevitable growing demand.

The rot set in once the Kirner ALP State Government sold the Loy Yang B station in the early 90s, and the Kennett Liberal Government subsequently broke up the whole generation, transmission and retail of power. Since the mid 90s Victoria no longer had the SEC, which had responsibility for planning and introduction of new power stations - brown coal, gas or wind. After that time we have been completely exposed to retaining ancient stations like Hazelwood (which would have been retired years before the 2017 closure under SEC ownership). What we have now is total market failure - the State Government is out of the game and instead of a retail competition bonanza, Victorians have dozens of power retailers whose bills require a PhD to comprehend.

Out of ten, how would you score privatisation?

Ever since Kennett privatised the lot, successive Victorian Premiers seem to have believed that they had no obligation to ensure adequate power supplies available to meet the inevitable growing demand.

The rot set in once the Kirner ALP State Government sold the Loy Yang B station in the early 90s, and the Kennett Liberal Government subsequently broke up the whole generation, transmission and retail of power. Since the mid 90s Victoria no longer had the SEC, which had responsibility for planning and introduction of new power stations - brown coal, gas or wind. After that time we have been completely exposed to retaining ancient stations like Hazelwood (which would have been retired years before the 2017 closure under SEC ownership). What we have now is total market failure - the State Government is out of the game and instead of a retail competition bonanza, Victorians have dozens of power retailers whose bills require a PhD to comprehend.

Victoria is not the only state to have gone down this route of course but Jeff certainly got Victoria out of the gates early (and economists say got way over the odds for some of our state owned assets). Cain / Kirner got rid of the State Bank as well, can't remember what other assets they privatised.

State ownership or lack thereof is not necessarily the problem the problem is the lack of any sort of plan or legislative framework that allows decisions about investment to be made.

An interesting story about just some of the problems facing the grid here https://reneweconomy.com.au/victoria-solar-farms-face-tighter-constraints-new-projects-may-be-blocked-from-grid-82973/

Since the mid 90s Victoria no longer had the SEC.

The SECV is still around, just not in the form that it once was.

Out of ten, how would you score privatisation?

Pretty low!

Out of ten, how would you score privatisation?

Pretty low!

Out of ten, how would you score privatisation?

Pretty low!

Since the mid 90s Victoria no longer had the SEC.

The SECV is still around, just not in the form that it once was.

The SEC only exists as a power trading entity supporting the Alcoa aluminium smelter - just a shadow of its former self.

Victoria is not the only state to have gone down this route of course but Jeff certainly got Victoria out of the gates early (and economists say got way over the odds for some of our state owned assets). Cain / Kirner got rid of the State Bank as well, can't remember what other assets they privatised.

State ownership or lack thereof is not necessarily the problem the problem is the lack of any sort of plan or legislative framework that allows decisions about investment to be made.

An interesting story about just some of the problems facing the grid here https://reneweconomy.com.au/victoria-solar-farms-face-tighter-constraints-new-projects-may-be-blocked-from-grid-82973/

Victoria was seriously affected by the cost blow outs in commissioning the Loy Yang Power Station. It was servicing a vast amounts of debt as a result and the State was hugely impacted by the international recession in the early 90s. Jeff Kennett and Alan Stockdale flogged off the power industry and largely paid off State debt in following years. They also sacked a large amount of (the admittably bloated) local workforce and caused a huge economic downturn in the Latrobe Valley without a jot of restructuring assistance - 25 years on, the region remains economically impacted by those times. As any Latrobe Valley power worker knows, power station maintenance by the privatized SECV successors is now cut to the bone, which is one reason there are so many unit failures that cut production in peak demand periods. Nowadays, it's like producing power with an aged 35 year old Holden. That's why Engie closed Hazelwood - it was 47 years old and completely beyond the operating life the SECV ever planned.

Whilst we still have vast reserves of brown coal, there is virtually no financial institution that will align its name with that fuel, so apart from the promising coal to hydrogen prospect at Loy Yang, there will be no more use of brown coal as an energy source.

No small business can justify buying a generator for a once or twice a year power outage. Just look at the ongoing maintenance costs for company's maintaining diesel fire water pumps.

An aluminium smelter can usually recover ok after max of 3h no power. Beyond that they will struggle to save all the pots, perhaps 10-25% failure after 4h and the entire plant after 5-6 h. If they got back 50% of the power by 3h then this will buy then an hour or two, after which they will need to make a decision to cut out 50% of the production and how they do that.

From the feedback I'm getting the fed and state govts have been told to look after the aluminium industry and it will help them with the RE targets. ie the smelters can forgo power for short period of time to deal with rapid changing of wind and solar outputs or peaks in demand. If the smelter closes it doesn't help the RE case and will just see base load power terminated that is no longer available.

Is Portland subsidised? Depends on your perspective. It was a political decision to put it there, not where it should have been placed and as such is entitled to be supported until its closed for other reasons, typically end of life. Its a good plant and deserves to be given a break and allowed to contribute to the Vic economy and in particular that of western Vic.

++++

Portland is massively subsidised by the State and Federal Governments.
It has been an economic disaster for Victoria, particularly since its establishment when the Cain ALP Government underwrote a long term power supply agreement after years of dithering by Dick Hamer's Liberals. The power losses over the vast distance between the Latrobe Valley and Portland (up to 15% just disappears). Whilst I acknowledge the importance of supporting local jobs in the south west, this has been a very expensive venture for Victorian taxpayers over 30+ years.

No small business can justify buying a generator for a once or twice a year power outage. Just look at the ongoing maintenance costs for company's maintaining diesel fire water pumps.

I'd like to see the extravagant service costs ! Don't have a diesel generator and maintenance, what oil filter, air cleaner and some cleaner for the the injector/s.

BG said they'd had 4 outages in 6 months;

We have had 4 major outages in the last 6 months or so all of which lead to hundreds of thousands of $$$ of losses to local businesses and the awful sight of perfectly good food being binned.

Think this speaks for it's self.

BigShunter.

I'm just going to duck in here and say this about the Portland smelter: if that smelter wasn't built it would've taken a lot longer to build a smaller interconnect between Victoria and South Australia. The Hamer Government's decision to subsidise the smelter by offering to cover the extra capital costs of building the massive dual-circuit 500kV transmission line out to Portland has ended up underwriting the the rapid growth in wind farms in the Western District over the last decade and part of the growth in renewable energy capacity in SA. Sometimes those pork barrels can have silver linings.

Out of ten, how would you score privatisation?

Zero. I have asked the question in a number of areas, "Could somebody show me how privatisation has benefited me personally?"
I have yet to get a positive answer.

No small business can justify buying a generator for a once or twice a year power outage. Just look at the ongoing maintenance costs for company's maintaining diesel fire water pumps.

Companies of certain sizes and/or lines of business are compelled by law to (a) have diesel-powered fire pumps and (b) undertake tests and maintenance on a regular business.  In terms of turnover, these costs are quite small.
The small business, which has no such compulsions, particularly since the thing is a generator set and not a fire pump, will be liable for next to no cost. If the set isn't used, it needs little except for a precautionary run every two or three months just to charge the battery, ensure that it starts and so on.
In other words, the costs are anything but extravagant.