Chaos Rules: Massive Wind Power Output Collapses Threaten Total Grid Failure

The claim that spreading wind turbines far and wide means you’ll have power around-the-clock is just more wind industry myth. Australia’s Eastern Grid provides all the evidence required to render that story plainly risible – and it can all be done with pictures.

Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia its entire capacity routinely delivers just a trickle of its combined notional capacity of 11,409MW – rarely more than 50% thereof, and often less than 10% of the total notional capacity.

Depicted below – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid so far this month.

Collapses of over 3,000 MW or more – that occur over the space of a couple of hours – are routine, as are rapid surges of equal magnitude, which make the grid manager’s life a living hell, and provide the perfect set up for power market price gouging by the owners of conventional generators, who cash in on the regular chaos.

For a brief period on 3 June, Australia’s whirling wonders managed to pump out 3,218 MW (or 28% of their total capacity) before plummeting to 387 MW (or a trivial 3.4% of total capacity). The cause of that 2,831 MW collapse is no secret: it’s called calm weather.

Anyone using reliable and wind power in a sentence is a propagandist, delusional, or both.

As the team from Jo Nova details below, the idea that any country can power itself on sunshine and breezes is simply nuts.

We have World Class windless weather: Today 95% of wind turbines on the continent of Australia are failing
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
May 2024

There is no saving the Australian wind industry from a high pressure cell. Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste.

Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working. Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.

The green bar below represents total wind generation today compared to the total power consumed (the black line).

Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia.

The Australian government is telling us “we’re different” to other countries struggling to make wind and solar work. We supposedly have “world-class resources” and “natural advantages in renewables“. But we also have world-class high pressure cells that stop wind generation across the entire nation simultaneously. On days like these, it doesn’t matter much whether we have 1,000 wind turbines or 10,000 if 95% of them are failing.

Compared to Europe, we have a natural disadvantage in wind power — there’s no one to rescue us when we screw up. We’re surrounded by vast oceans which make interconnectors prohibitively long, expensive and a strategic security risk for communist ships that might drag anchors accidentally-on-purpose through a region with long sub-sea cables. (Which is apparently what happened in the Baltic Sea last year).

So where exactly can we build another thousand wind turbines that would work on a day like today? Macquarie Island or Antarctica?

And it’s not just one day. So far for May 2024 wind generation has been unusually low about half the time.

On May 25th at one point the entire generation was just 221MW or 2% of total wind power capacity. So that’s 98% useless.

Australia has 11GW wind power “capacity” and 5% of that is working.

There’s no extension cord long enough to get to the land at the top of The Renewable Faraway tree where we have dependable wind
Over in Western Australia, total wind production this minute (1pm WA time) is 30MW. So even a new cable 2,000 kilometers long from Perth to South Australia won’t save the national grid. It’s not blowing in WA either. Wind power is only supplying 1.5% of the total electricity on the Western Wholesale Market for Perth and South West Australia. The total installed capacity of wind power in the West is about 1 GW, so it is supplying only 3 to 5% of that.

Macquarie Island is 2,500 kilometers from the closest Australian capital city, and Casey base Antarctica is 3,500 kilometers away. It’s 2,000 kilometers direct to New Zealand, which is bad enough, but parts of the Tasman Sea are 5km deep. They don’t call it the “abyss” for nothing. In any case, wind speeds over New Zealand right now are only 1 – 7 km/hr. (At about 3pm EST Australia).

For the record, the National Energy Grid connects the Eastern five states of Australia and 90% of the population and is running at about 25GW in late autumn. The South West grid is a tenth of that, and all those other dots, apart from Darwin, are “microgrids”. In some parts of Australia all we need is one diesel generator, and we’ll put it on the national map. Kings Canyon, for example is just 1.1MW. The square is vastly larger than the town.

Today the 24 hour fuel mix on the NEM is 72% coal, and 9% gas.
Jo Nova Blog