SA faces more power woes after generator goes offline
Updated
South Australians have been asked to conserve electricity and consider turning off appliances to avoid potential load-shedding after three units at Torrens Island Power Station went offline following spot fires.
Four spot fires and a possible explosion at the power plant resulted in three units generating a combined 400 megawatts of power going offline at 3:33pm.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) also reported a loss of 200 megawatts of power from the nearby Pelican Point Power Station, which tripped as a result of the Torrens Island incident.
It has asked the market to respond, declaring there was a lack of reserve power available in SA.
There are fears this could lead to load-shedding — ordered by AEMO when power demand outstrips supply — and which most recently led to 90,000 Adelaide customers being switched off during a heatwave in February.
SA Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said South Australians should turn off all non-essential items when they go home tonight, such as dishwashers and washing machines.
"AEMO has requested as a precautionary measure to help avoid potential load-shedding that people conserve electricity and run air conditioners at a higher temperature of about 26 degrees," he said.
"To meet the drop in supply and manage risk within the system, AEMO has directed available additional generation to turn on."
A Metropolitan Fire Service spokesperson said that on arrival, they found "on-site AGL personnel had extinguished a series of small spot fires using dry power fire extinguishers".
Torrens Island is the state's largest power generator, with a total of eight gas-fired units that generate up to 1,280 megawatts.
It was not clear how many units were in use at the time of the outage and the extent of the damage and time it will take to be repaired remains unknown.
The Pelican Point Power Station is being rebooted.
South Australians on tenterhooks over power supply
The reliability of SA's power supply has been a controversial topic since September last year when wild weather resulted in a state-wide blackout.
Another blackout occurred in December, when an electrical fault on the Victorian side of the border prompted the failure of the Heywood Interconnector, which was contributing about 220 megawatts into SA's mix.
SA Power Networks said the cause of the Torrens Island fires was being investigated and did not appear to be caused by its distribution network.
Mr Koutsantonis said the outage was not caused by "some inherent fragility of the system" but was due to fires and the close proximity of large generators to each other.
"The restart is occurring during a very high demand [period]," he said.
"Is it frustrating? Yes absolutely.
"The important thing here now is rather than a blame game is to try and help people help the market operator manage the system for the next couple of hours by keeping the demand low."
Wholesale power prices in SA spiked and hit the maximum allowable limit of $14,000 per megawatt hour.
Topics: community-and-society, electricity-energy-and-utilities, adelaide-5000, sa
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