ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Looming Powercrisis in New Zealand

We can have nuclear electricity and still remain opposed to nuclear weapons. New Zealands anti-nuclear stance has always been against warships and weapons. Not electricity generation.

Not to worries! The NZ Gummint ain't, if the media are to be believed; [actually they're not, but that's beside the point].
I read that NZG are not even going to start public information excercises on saving electricity till the power-cuts actually occur. They have, however ordered in a few extra bags of coal for Hunley, so that's all right then!
I'd get some candles and firewood in if I were you- it could be a ruddy cold winter.

Alan

Government couldn't give a hoot about a powercrisis.
They will find a good excuse to increase tariffs again, when power is at a premium because of low hydro storage.
Interestingly the so called temporary powerincreases NEVER get reduced when there is plenty of power and hydro available.

At the Hepburn outage there were actually 39000 customers affected, SADI minutes were ± 1.5 Milion.
Also with the overload on the 100 MVA bank one of the single Phase 33.3 MVA transformers blew up too, and was tripped out on the Buchholz master trip.
a spare was luckily on hand and was required to be railed into position which took about 2.5 hours.

We had an other outage from the same supply grid exit point substation today affecting around 38000 customers. ( 110 kV / 33 kV )
Haven't got the exact details yet what caused this but it aint looking good while the wheater is still quite warm.

The outage was for about ½ hour. I will post if more details appear later on.

Thats right Alan, our government can't understand what all the fuss is about and won't start any power saving measures until we have a problem. Thats our ignorant gummint for ya.

Rodalco it sounds like stress on the grid is much worse in the North Island.

Reminds me of the line from one of the classic Carry On movies:

"What are we going to do then?"

"Do? We're British. We're not going to do anything. Not until it's too late."

Many a true word, etc.

Ireland's sort of in a similar situation when it comes to power. We've a situation where the population and economic activity have increased extremely rapidly and the power generation capacity isn't really keeping up.

The Irish Govenrment opened the power market to full competition and in their attempt to force the ESB (the state owned former monopoly poco) to loose market share to new entrants, limited its ability to expand existing power plants. The logic was that any new capacity must come from new entrants to the market. However, they've been too slow to build sufficient capacity and it would have made a lot more sense to allow the ESB to simply expand existing plants to cope with demand.

The result has been that we're getting very close to the max generation capacity of the existing plants. Because of the huge demand maintenence cycles can't be followed as normal i.e. plants can't have their usual down time.

So far, we haven't had any power outages, but if it doesn't get resolved within the next few years we're going to have trouble.

The ESB are now expanding plants and there's also a major interconnector project about to start to link the Republic of Ireland directly into the British and European grids.

As it stands we've a small AC interconnector into the Northern Irish network which is in turn connected to Britain via a DC interconnector (The moyle interconnector). However, it's simply not big enough to supply sufficient power to the Republic.

I would reckon that NZ has similar problems being a small island system with no interconnection to a larger super grid.

At least smaller european or north american networks can tap into other supplies by buying power in over the grid if local capacity's not keeping up.

Exactly djk, You hit the nail on the head!

It's that bad at the moment that simple maintenance becomes impossible, These last two outages were due to line maintenance only. By having a second circuit off for busbar work and installing new insulators and new line breakers a little shift in loading causes overload and tripping.

The attitude towards the thermal stations is, 'We just run them harder' , which means in general they clock up more running hours, more wear and tear and eventual faillure of plant.

In New Zealand we rely for about 70% on hydro capacity, a fair amount (± 1200 MW)comes from the South Island via the interconnecting DC link across the Cook Street.

North Island has around 1600 MW hydro available from various stations all over the place.
Thermal stations (± 3000 MW)are there for back up and some are used for base load in the North Island.
Some are peak load stations which were designed for periods up to 4 hours at a time morning and evening peak periods.
Sometimes these stations run for days at a time when the hydro lakes are low.
You can see that is receipt for disaster.

And also what you mentioned too djk
We have no access to an other bulk grid supply. Nearest would be Australia which is about 1700 kms away.

I will keep you posted from power hungry Auckland.
Cheers Ray

Edited for insert of text I forgot

[This message has been edited by RODALCO (edited 04-22-2006).]

So I am told (5th hand knowledge) the North Island is now supplying the South Island.
So, if the North Island has all this spare capacity, where is it coming from and why are we supplying them in the first place?.
Chop the cables!.
Egg-heads.