Control settings at eight wind farms were at the heart of a blackout that left 850,000 Australians without electricity and sparked a national debate over the growing role of renewables in the power system, according to the final report on the outage by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
The final AEMO report on the 28 September 2016 blackout in the state of South Australia tracks a sequence of events put in train by atrocious weather – complete with tornadoes, winds of up to 260km/h and lightning – that knocked out three transmission lines, with dramatic consequences for the 883MW of wind, 330MW of gas and 613MW of inter-state imported power serving the system at the time.
