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Where Australia's electricity comes from

This widget is updated every couple of minutes and shows why Australia is such a huge GHG emitter.

The ABC has lost all credibility.

Today's debacle on the ABC news site: Chris Uhlmann and Co doing more misleading reporting in an attempt to sink renewables.

So on their home page there's a link in the right column titled "Uhlmann: Wind outage a key factor behind SA blackout"

Naturally this gives the impression that the Coalition and Uhlmann were right to blame renewables for the recent blackout. However, the actual report from the AEMO does not blame renewables at all.

When you follow the link from the home page to the article, you're confronted with a different title:

South Australia's storm caused transmission faults, but that's not the whole story

The article starts with this:

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has found that the sudden and unexpected loss of half of South Australia's wind power in the midst of the severe storm on September 28 was a key event in the state-wide blackout.

The operator's update on the outage shows it expected all generators should have been able to ride through the transmission faults caused by the storm.

"Nine wind farms exhibited unexpected power reduction during the six voltage disturbances on the transmission system," AMEO's report said.


Now that's true, but putting it first, and after linking via a misleading title on the home page, is an obvious attempt to spin it as much as they can to sink renewables. It's basically indefensible and irresponsible reporting, of the abysmal quality you'd expect from a Murdoch rag.

It fails to mention that the failure of some (not all wind farms) was due to a software setting that took them offline after a couple of bad blips in the network. Other wind farms, with different software settings, were fine. IOW, the problem had nothing to do with wind power as such. It was purely down to a maunfacturer's software setting that didn't allow the farm to rise out a sequence of network voltage drops. From the AEMO report:

The size of voltage dips observed by SA wind turbines online at the time of the event was sufficient for ten of the thirteen wind farms online to activate their fault ride-through mode. Depending on the wind farm, this mode of turbine operation was activated between three and six times, as shown in Table 4.

Of the 13 wind farms on line prior to the event, four remained in service: Canunda, Lake Bonney 1, Lake Bonney 2 & 3, and Waterloo. Of these, only one (Waterloo) initiated ride-through mode multiple times, but it remained in service because it was set to a limit of more than six ride-through events.


So the software settings are easily changed, thereby solving the problem. The ABC article fails to mention this. The ABC article also fails to mention several other important aspects of the report. For example:

But the report also points to two other major problems.

The first is that fossil fuels are not a panacea as some would wish. The diesel and gas generators paid handsomely to provide black start services to the state both failed, one within 15 seconds, causing the blackout to last much longer than it would have done otherwise. AEMO refuses to name the failed generators, citing “confidentiality” agreements.

The three diesel generators that should have provided power to Port Lincoln also failed – two tripped almost immediately and the third had to be shut down.

And, as the report also notes, this is not the first time that the Heywood interconnector has been separated from the state. Three of the previous disconnections occurred when the main coal generator, the now closed Northern brown coal power station, tripped and caused the system to collapse. The other occurred when bushfires in Victoria caused multiple transmission line failures.


This is worth reading to get a fuller picture: Storm of controversy erupts over AEMO blackout report

VictorVenema

Comments

  • "All credibility"??  Settle down. What about the ABC Science Unit? For that matter, what about other ABC political journalists? Chris Uhlmann is a senior political reporter but he's not the whole ABC. He's not even the whole of ABC News.
     

  • Ok, I'll give Dr. Karl a pass. =)

    But really, allowing Uhlmann's article to be published, particularly in that manner with the deliberately inflammatory link on the home page, does show such abysmal judgement that it calls into question the whole news service. Especially since he is the senior editor and should know better.

    It's a case of if they'll go that low, they can no longer be relied on to the "good old ABC" you could trust if there was doubt. They now have to be assumed to be full of it, unless they are supported by a reliable source.
  • AND Robin Williams a high distinction  :)

    I don't want to make too much of this, but I do think it's important to try and avoid scattergun attacks on media outlets, especially those that attempt, or perhaps only claim to attempt, factual reporting. In most cases the selection and treatment of topics is mainly driven by the need to get advertisements in front of eyes. Aunty's imperatives are a bit different, but she still needs to give her audiences (I get cranky when people talk about The ABC audience - there must be at least 15) enough of what they know they want.

    Even Murdoch papers occasionally do useful climate related reporting. I've just come across this report in The Oz, of all places, from Senate estimates:  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/govt-funded-lomborgs-vanity-book-senate-estimates/news-story/c910a37727718a081b303897238a3913

    The sidebar description reads:  " In today’s High Wired we get mansplained by Birmo and get very perplexed about $640,000 for ‘vanity publishing’ " 

    The guts of the story is that Australian taxpayers handed Lomborg $640,000 to support “extensive consultations through youth forums, media discussions, meeting with world leaders, including interactions with Australian dignitaries and officials, a number of papers that were commissioned from academics in areas that were relevant to the millennial development goals”.

    But it was unclear which academics contributed to the book — none appear to be attributed — or what they produced. It is also unclear about the other activities under the funding.

    I hope Uhlmann, or an alert junior reporter, picks that one up.
  • The thing about the ABC is that it was always supposed to be the sane one. Given the tumultuous history of climate policy (ha! such as it is) and "the debate" in this country, I would hope that a national broadcaster charge with sticking to high standards would think very carefully before throwing unnecessary spanners in the works. It really is not in the national interest to go off half-cocked and pander to the raving loonies.

    If Uhlmann wants to talk politics, I'm fine with that. He's the political editor. Politics is his thing. However, if he wants to get into technical subjects that he's not well versed in, particularly when they have all sorts of important ramifications in combination with a history of humungous bunfights, then it really would be a bloody good idea if he learned what he was talking about before shooting his mouth off. He seems to have operated on the basis that since this subject had political implications, that somehow made him an instant expert.
    PG_Antioch
  • I have to agree that the ABC's coverage of this and of climate change and energy issues in general is seriously deficient. Like all large and diverse organisations it can vary widely but it's via their news and current affairs services that we should expect a lot better. They do seem to have shifted to be more  in line with our other mainstream media organisations - ie willing to go along with downplaying and pushing aside what may be the most significant global issue of our age. I did get a positive brief moment when Barrie Cassidy asked his guest media 'journalists' what was missing in the media discussion about the SA incident - the missing element being climate change. Energy policy, if we take the coverage on face value, apparently has no relationship to the climate issue.

    Truly it's way past overdue to see some serious questions asked of our politicians about what they think and where they stand - not just asked but investigated, because I think there is such a huge divergence between what many of our senior and highly placed politicians say their position on climate is and what they (aggressively don't) do about it that it requires serious and deliberate misdirection and misrepresentation to sustain it.
  • The thing about the ABC is that it was always supposed to be the sane one. Given the tumultuous history of climate policy (ha! such as it is) and "the debate" in this country, I would hope that a national broadcaster charge with sticking to high standards would think very carefully before throwing unnecessary spanners in the works. It really is not in the national interest to go off half-cocked and pander to the raving loonies.

    If Uhlmann wants to talk politics, I'm fine with that. He's the political editor. Politics is his thing. However, if he wants to get into technical subjects that he's not well versed in, particularly when they have all sorts of important ramifications in combination with a history of humungous bunfights, then it really would be a bloody good idea if he learned what he was talking about before shooting his mouth off. He seems to have operated on the basis that since this subject had political implications, that somehow made him an instant expert.
    Think SEEPAGE

    http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyseepage.html

    By Stephan Lewandowsky
    Professor, School of Experimental Psychology and Cabot Institute, University of Bristol
    Posted on 7 May 2015
    Filed under Climate denial

    The article “Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community” just appeared in Global Environmental Change. The article is authored by me and Naomi Oreskes, James S. Risbey, Ben R. Newell, and Michael Smithson.

    It is open access and can be found here.

    Seepage: The Executive Summary

    We initiate our argument with the known fact that vested interests and political agents have long opposed political or regulatory action in response to climate change by appealing to scientific uncertainty. We know from earlier work that uncertainty is no cause for inaction—on the contrary, greater scientific uncertainty should make us worry more, not less, about the potential consequences of climate change. Alas, those actual scientific implications are often inverted in public discourse where uncertainty often invites wishful thinking and hence inaction. In this new article, we examine the effect of contrarian talking points that arise out of uncertainty on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psychological and cognitive reasons why scientists may nevertheless be susceptible to uncertainty-based argumentation, even when scientists recognize those arguments as false and are actively rebutting them.

    Climate scientists have done an admirable job pursuing their science under great political pressure, and they have tirelessly rebutted pseudoscientific arguments against their work. Nonetheless, being human, scientists’ operate with the same cognitive apparatus and limitations as every other person. In consequence, it is important to be aware of the factors that may cause scientists to take positions that they would be less likely to take in the absence of outspoken public opposition. We refer to this phenomenon as seepage.

    We highlight three well-known psychological mechanisms that may facilitate the seepage of contrarian memes into scientific discourse and thinking: ‘stereotype threat’, ‘pluralistic ignorance’ and the ‘third-person effect’.

    Stereotype threat refers to the emotional and behavioural responses when a person is reminded of an adverse stereotype against a group to which they belong.  Thus, when scientists are stereotyped as ‘alarmists’, a predicted response would be for them to try to avoid seeming alarmist by downplaying the degree of threat. There are now severalstudies that highlight this tendency by scientists to avoid highlighting risks, lest they be seen as ‘alarmist.’ 

    Pluralistic ignorance describes the phenomenon which arises when a minority opinion is given disproportionate prominence in public debate, resulting in the majority of people incorrectly assuming their opinion is marginalized.  Thus, a public discourse that asserts that the IPCC has exaggerated the threat of climate change may cause scientists who disagree to think their views are in the minority, and they may therefore feel inhibited from speaking out in public.


    PG_Antioch
  • edited October 2016
    I know that's written about the scientific community, but it certainly relates to the way media has handled climate science and Earth awareness.  Always asking the wrong questions:

    Is this storm caused by global warming ?
    Get real, in a warming world, EVERY storm carries the imprint of the warmed up global system !
    and such tactical stupefying nonsense.

    Also the poisoning influence of the Murdochs and Kochs can't be over emphasized.
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