Turning the Lights Back on
upstart writes:
South Australia experienced a state-wide blackout in 2016 due to a severe storm that damaged critical electricity transmission infrastructure and left 850,000 customers without power. Most electricity supplies were restored within eight hours, but it was a major event and prompted a multi-agency response involving emergency services and the Australian Defence Force.
[...] Historically, Australia has been heavily reliant on gas and coal generator units for system restart after a blackout, but those units are quickly reaching their end-of-life.
The grid has also changed significantly in the last decade alone, and today's electricity network looks very different, with large commercial wind and solar farms making up a higher percentage of Australia's generation mix every year.
Sorrell's work looks at how power systems can be restarted using large-scale, grid-forming batteries storing power from wind and solar sources as the primary restart source. While he recognises restarting the grid is not something most renewable plants were intentionally designed for in the first place, he remains confident in their ability.
"We're 100 per cent moving in a direction where large-scale batteries are going to feature prominently, if not be the primary black starter of the grid after major blackouts," Sorrell said.
During the South Australian blackout, severe weather damaged powerlines and subsequently nearly all wind turbines across the state shut down in quick succession. This was caused by a protection setting unknown to operators. Losing the turbines caused a massive energy imbalance, and with far too much load for the generation available the system collapsed. Within seconds, the whole state lost power.
"It's not because it's wrong for those protection devices to be there. They're there for very good reasons," Sorrell said.
"What the problem tends to be, and what was the case in South Australia, was that despite being compliant with existing standards, these particular settings were not present in the models that the manufacturers provided."
This meant the equipment was not being correctly represented, either in technical standards or in the simulation models that power system operators need, especially in understanding extreme circumstances.
Sorrell said there has since been a concerted effort across the industry to implement new standards in modelling so that they accurately represent the equipment in the field and their performance.
"Australia is a world-leader for setting modelling and performance standards," he said.
In his latest System Restoration and Black Start DOCX (15 MB) report, Sorrell used these next generation computer models and simulations to explore how large-scale batteries, wind and solar can actively participate in system restart.
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