No need for surrender Bazz, a truce is fine :).

Aidan/Bazz, thanks for that info on GTO thyristors and trains, it was new to me. They're not a device I'm familiar with. These days the big work is on high electron mobility transistors, some of which are now capable of carrying currents in the low thousands of amps, which makes them candidates for use in electronic power transformers, not unlike your computer's switch mode power supply on steroids. They're also useful in HVDC, which is growing fast as the technology improves. It's much more efficient in that role than its AC cousin.

Load shedding would not have been an option in the time frame available. It's got to be well planned and precisely carried out or it can cause problems of its own, not to mention that it's highly charged politically. Like the Brisbane floods, I suspect this will have some people in high places looking to "blame" people who were just doing their jobs to the best of their ability, as we're already seeing from one political operative on this site. Also like the Brisbane floods, I suspect it will turn out that what is needed is better decision making at a high level with regard to critical operating choices. The margins of operating safety may need to be increased a little to ensure similar events don't recur.

Wise people learn from events like this, lesser minds run around in circles looking for someone to take the fall and chattering pointlessly about things they don't understand.

Shadow Minister, you're looking increasingly out of your depth. Neither of your last two posts have had any basis in reality.

Now I know you can read and with all those degrees you claim to have I'm sure you're capable of understanding the words you read, so presumably you are deliberately choosing to be misleading and dishonest.

That is why I said you have a "shabby reputation" in an earlier post.

Sorry Aidan, I neglected to answer your question about synchronisation and generation. I was a little overdramatic in saying the plant could fail, it could certainly lose sync and require time to be brought back to speed though, and possibly propagate the power failure through other parts of the network it serves. Having thought a little more about the SA situation, the biggest threat would have been to the major substations on the interconnector. If the problem was able to propagate back to the generator it would have been exceptionally poor engineering.

You're right to suggest that the interconnector suddenly failing has the same potential. When it's shut down, there is an orderly process of switching excess power to load banks while the generator output is reduced being reduced. There is a fair amount of resiliency in the system, it takes a really catastrophic event like the toppling of a major transmission line to cause the sorts of problems in SA.

CM: Wise people learn from events like this, lesser minds run around in circles looking for someone to take the fall and chattering pointlessly about things they don't understand.

You are so right. Unfortunately it's the Lesser Minds that usually call the shots.
<highly charged politically. Like the Brisbane floods, I suspect this will have some people in high places looking to "blame" people who were just doing their jobs to the best of their ability,>

I once a Military Meme that said, "Always remember the weapon you are supplied with was provided by the lowest bidder." & so it is with all the infrastructure we have in Australia. Substandard Materials, Shortcuts & Minimum Specifications & all done at the cheapest price.

Bazz,

Since I replied to your post I realised that we were slightly at cross purposes; I referred to what happened on the trains, you at the substations. So I guess a bit of further explanation is required:

Regenerative braking in trains isn't always able to feed power back into the grid; sometimes it can only be used to power other trains. In the In the pre thyristor era, that situation was the norm. AFAIK no ignitrons fed the grid; instead the few exceptions used rotating equipment.

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Craig,

IGBTs (insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors) have started to replace GTOs in the rail industry. IGBTs have the advantage of being faster and not needing such sophisticated control equipment, but GTOs still have the significant advantage of being smaller.

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Shadow,

There are indeed multiple transmission lines linking Adelaide and Port Augusta. Three of those that do are the ones that brought the wind power to Adelaide and two of those failed in the storm. The fourth one does not have nay wind farms along its length, but it also failed in the storm.

Thanks for that Aidan, another technology I wasn't aware of, but with familiar operating principles.

Do you work in the rail industry?

The latest news from the still-running enquiry is that the blackout occurred BEFORE the towers toppled. There was too much wind for the windmills, so that meant their 900MW was lost and the unrealistic demand on Victoria sank the boat. The renewable energy disciples probably won't have much to stay about that.