Victoria’s blackout had nothing to do with renewables. Claiming that it did won’t fix the system

More than 500,000 electricity customers were without power in Victoria on Tuesday after storms swept across the state, downing power lines and transmission towers.

But as workers and system managers scrambled to get power back online, some commentators and Coalition MPs were unable to resist the urge to somehow blame renewable energy.

In the Australian, the chief executive of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Paul Guerra, said the outage “merely highlights how fragile our system is”, saying that “support for net zero will start to weaken if we get events like this regularly”.

The federal opposition’s energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, claimed the outage made it clear there was a “need for an electricity system resilient to the weather, not reliant on it”.

Nationals MP Keith Pitt told Sky News this was “a glimpse of the future” without coal-fired power, and radio host Ben Fordham said Australians should “be afraid – this is the future”, adding that “solar and batteries failed to fill the void” during the outage.

Except the outages had nothing to do with the type of power generation – rather, they were sparked by damage to high-voltage transmission lines and the lower-voltage distribution system.

What happened?

Two main parts of Victoria’s energy system were affected by the storms on Tuesday: the high-voltage transmission system of towers and wires connected to power generators such as coal plants and windfarms; and the more local, low-voltage distribution system that takes power to customers. Victoria has five distributors.

At the event’s peak on Tuesday, 530,000 customers were without power.

By Wednesday afternoon, the Australian Energy Market Operator said 174,000 homes and businesses remained without power and restoring electricity to everyone could take “days if not weeks”.

Victoria’s energy department reported that six transmission towers were affected on Tuesday – including at least two buckled and twisted – and, at the same time, the major coal-fired Loy Yang A power station tripped.

Glenne Drover, secretary of the Victorian branch of the Australian Institute of Energy, said the loss of transmission towers near Geelong tripped four units at Loy Yang A with a loss of 2.1 gigawatts of electricity.

That event put the electricity system out of balance, triggering the Australian Energy Market Operator to ask AusNet – which owns the transmission network – to cut off power (a process known as load shedding) to about 90,000 customers.

Assoc Prof Roger Dargaville, deputy director of Monash Energy Institute, said Loy Yang A had tripped “to protect itself from permanent damage and in doing so actually kept the system stable. It did what the system is designed to do.”

He said the fact that complete system failure – like the one seen in South Australia in 2016 – was avoided was “testament to the resilience of the system”.

By 4pm, all customers affected by load shedding had their power restored. But at the same time, storms were bringing down power lines across Victoria’s distribution networks.

The two electricity distribution networks most affected were AusNet and United Energy.

AusNet – which serves outer eastern and outer northern Melbourne, and eastern and north-eastern Victoria – had 262,601 customers without power on Tuesday evening.

AusNet said on Tuesday a “combination of extreme temperatures, strong winds and thousands of lightning strikes have caused damage to poles, wires and other electrical infrastructure”.

United Energy, which serves south-east Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula, had 134,579 customer outages on Tuesday evening.

Drover said the majority of customers who lost power on Tuesday likely did so because of damage to the local distribution network.

Regardless of the power plants affected, “you would still have lost power to about 400,000 because of trees falling on local power lines”, he said.

Dr Dylan McConnell, an energy systems expert at the University of NSW, said any suggestion renewable energy should have saved the day was a “nonsense argument” because damage to the transmission and distribution networks can affect all forms of power, regardless of how it is generated.

However, McConnell said some households with rooftop solar backed up by batteries would – depending on the type of inverter they had installed – have been able to keep using their power even as others in their neighbourhood were cut off.

Ross Garnaut: climate change is dangerous for all power systems, renewable or not – videoPoliticising outages ‘bad form’

Both Drover and McConnell said it was not practical to build a system that can withstand every possible eventuality, including major storms bringing down power lines and transmission towers.

“The grid we have now since Labor won the federal election is no more resilient [to events like major storms] than the one we’ve had over the last 100 years,” Drover said.

McConnell added that losing power could mean life or death for some people in the community, and to be politicising the event while it was still unfolding was “bad form”.

Andrew Richards, the CEO at the Energy Users Association of Australia, which represents industrial and commercial energy users, said on LinkedIn: “When bad things happen to the energy system, like we saw [on Tuesday], everyone with a hobby horse gets on board and starts riding it around the track, more often than not in the wrong direction.

“To be clear, what we saw yesterday was severe weather smashing the Victorian energy system, which caused a cascading impact that saw both load and generation trip off.

“It’s not about wind, solar, coal, gas, nuclear, batteries or any other generation technology. Doesn’t matter what is attached to the system, when the system gets destroyed, what’s generating is irrelevant.

“The discussion that should come from [Tuesday] is the degree to which we need to harden the network against future weather events, how much that will cost and to what extent energy users are prepared to pay for any improvement in resilience.”