Thread: Taste of things to come?

We lost power at approximately 2pm on 13/02/2024.

As of noon on 14/02/2024 - we still don't have it back on.

Luckily I don't drive an EV - as I would be in trouble trying to charge it right now... In my 35 years of driving - I have never, ever been unable to buy petrol...

I thought the government had sorted all of our electricity issues - with magical wind & solar farms? One 5 minute storm at 500,000 people don't have power? And people tell me that this is the future?

Time to get serious an install a nuclear powerplant...

Originally Posted by Arapiles

The pylons that went down at Anakie must've been hit with amazing force - they're absolutely wrecked.

Pic from MSN:

BB1ieUDn.jpg

Another shot (courtesy of jacquifelgate on Facebook)

IMG_5569.jpg

Originally Posted by Arapiles

The pylons that went down at Anakie must've been hit with amazing force - they're absolutely wrecked.

They're reliant on a very clever structure to be *big* and light. If you buckle an element the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.
So it's probably a combination of age and degradation, and a weather event at the wrong time, angle and force.

We will probably see more events like this in Victoria. These storm events are like a Cat 1 or 2 cyclone passing through.

The power transmission towers built by the SECV in the ‘80s were not designed to handle convective downward wind gusts. Wind gusts in excess of 125kph can bring these towers down.

Same thing happened on this line in 2020 which took down 6 towers.

And like the 2020 event, the Mortlake gas power station is probably now supplying the Portland Smelter (came on line when Loy Yang A went down).

Still heaps without power and we can’t give the stuff away at the moment. Loy Yang is at half capacity with units 1 and 4 still off line, but that doesn’t really matter at the moment as there’s a huge excess with lots not being able to use it.

IMG_5570.jpg

Originally Posted by DiscoDB

We will probably see more events like this in Victoria. These storm events are like a Cat 1 or 2 cyclone passing through.

The power transmission towers built by the SECV in the ‘80s were not designed to handle convective downward wind gusts. Wind gusts in excess of 125kph can bring these towers down.

Same thing happened on this line in 2020 which took down 6 towers.

And like the 2020 event, the Mortlake gas power station is probably now supplying the Portland Smelter (came on line when Loy Yang A went down).

The storm cell sitting over Fitzroy/Carlton looked exactly like the ones in the US that create tornados. So it was probably something like that that hit the pylons. And the winds were going east but the squall that hit me when I was in my car came from the East.

Originally Posted by grey_ghost

We lost power at approximately 2pm on 13/02/2024.

As of noon on 14/02/2024 - we still don't have it back on.

Luckily I don't drive an EV - as I would be in trouble trying to charge it right now... In my 35 years of driving - I have never, ever been unable to buy petrol...

I thought the government had sorted all of our electricity issues - with magical wind & solar farms? One 5 minute storm at 500,000 people don't have power? And people tell me that this is the future?

Time to get serious an install a nuclear powerplant...

Given sufficient solar panels an EV would still be chargeable - as I've noted a couple of times the experience in Japan was that EVs were more resilient after Fukushima than ICE. And having nuclear energy would be of no assistance if the powerlines go down, which they did in this instance. And the powerlines going down has no connection to renewable power, except that climate change is making these kinds of event more common. We never used to have summer storms like this ....