What To Do With Your Solar & Battery During A Bushfire

Summer had a slow start around my place but it’s hard to miss now, and along with it, emergency warnings for bushfires, extreme heat and flooding.

So what special precautions should you take with your solar and battery systems?

Should You Switch Solar Off During A Bushfire Evacuation?

As bushfires tear through the state, authorities in Victoria have warned people that if they are going to evacuate, they should switch everything off in the main switchboard and shut down their solar, including any battery system.

I expect they’re trying to make it super simple for all involved. When the distribution authorities shut down the power for the whole district, they’re trying to make everyone safe and prevent any possibility of a fire being started by power lines. So firefighters can attack a building fire with confidence that there’s no power on.

If you don’t care about the contents of the freezer, go ahead and turn everything off in the main switchboard.  However it strikes me as a bit counterproductive to shut down power when you’ve invested in an expensive battery to keep things running.

Some people actually rely on their battery system to run fire pumps, internet and security measures. Although you would need a very gutsy system, electric pumps are far more reliable and easier to start remotely than a petrol or diesel pump.

My advice is to consider your particular position. Nobody wants to see people hurt if they’re responding to an emergency, but that could mean turning the mains off and leaving outside lights on to guide those who are trying to put out a blaze or seek shelter.

A warning from Energy Safe Victoria shared on social media.

What If You Aren’t Evacuating?

You may want to disconnect your battery system from a potentially unstable grid during an emergency. However you’ll be denying the grid support it could well need from your solar.

In any event, keep your consumption under control and bear in mind the grid might become the backup generator you need on day two or three of an extended emergency.

Aggregated together, every solar power system is helping reduce overall demand by something like 15-18%. It helps make the whole network more reliable and without it the wheels could well fall off the grid.

In the past we have seen particular events where network operators have called for people to turn off their solar power, however these have been technical emergencies where too much of a good thing is making life difficult for the grid.

Most natural disasters are a different beast. During Cyclone Alfred last year, Energy Queensland were instructing people to turn solar power off,  for no good reason. They were simply creating confusion, especially for people who’d invested in a battery for emergency power. They weren’t extending the same advice to people who had plugged in a backup generator.

One key thing to remember with bushfires is that they can effectively make day into night, so your solar can be rendered pretty useless by thick clouds of smoke, or indeed heavy cloud cover that follows a tropical storm or cyclone.

An Abundance Of Caution

If you have standard grid connected solar then it will shut itself down if the authorities turn off the power. The only good reason to turn off the system yourself would be to prevent a grid fault damaging your inverter.

It’s possible a falling branch could short circuit transmission onto distribution lines, and if that happens, 11,000volts will likely fry everything in the house. So if you’re risk averse you can switch your inverter (and everything else in the main switchboard) off to protect it.

Batteries Are Beautiful

If you’re lucky enough to have a battery, the first thing you should do is make sure the installation has been properly set up to give you protection from outages. Testing it should be as simple as flicking off the “Main Isolator Normal Supply” and noting the lights stay on (or come back in 15 seconds)

Your electrician should have run you through this when they handed over the documentation at the end of the installation. If they didn’t, then ring up and get the service you’ve paid for.

If There Is An Emergency

The second thing you might do is force the battery to charge to 100% from the grid. Systems like Tesla are automated and call this function “stormwatch” however many will need you to intervene with a change in settings via the monitoring app.

This is especially important if you have a Virtual Power Plant exercising external control. Nobody cares much about making $2 on the wholesale electricity market during a fire or flood.

Summer Makes Energy Interesting

For years Australian energy systems have been most taxed in peak summer, driven by refrigeration and increasingly air conditioning of badly constructed, poorly designed, and oversized houses.

Whether it’s the generation assets, boilers, turbines, alternators, pumps & associated systems, or distribution, the transformers, switch yards, power lines & connections, in high summer heat everything is more prone to failure.

And it’s not just the environmental heat, it’s electrical heat from the inside, due to high current loads. I’ve seen cases where energy network office staff have literally been dragged out to substations, given a deckchair, hat and a hose and told to spray water on overworked transformers to get them through the afternoon.

TINGLING TAPS CAN KILL

Be Aware

If the power supply to your house develops a poor connection (sometimes called a loose neutral) then everything in the house connected to the earth circuit can become live. The metal case of any appliance may give you a shock.

• This can happen if a tree branch falls and breaks an overhead line or if there’s simply an overheated connection.
• RCD safety switches won’t work.

If you get a tickle, tingle or zap from your taps or appliances,

step away and ring your local network company.

• Don’t open the metal switchboard. 
• The poles and wires people will send a truck quicker than you can hang up the phone
• They’ll diagnose for free, and if it’s a problem on their side of the supply fuse they’ll fix it for free too.
• While it’s a rare occurrence, it’s happened at my house this week, and it’s highly dangerous.

Solar Is The Good News

I’m reliably informed that over the last few days we’ve seen exceptionally high demand on the National Electricity Market. When you include the output from behind the meter solar, we’ve seen the 1st, 3rd and 4th highest demand days on record during the January 7th – 10th heatwave that swept the NEM.

Encouragingly, rooftop solar managed to carry a heavy share of the load through this period of intense demand, helping the grid sail through without the issued it used to suffer through hot summer days.

Green and gold represent wind and solar but the novelty for this year is the appearance of dark blue batteries which are eating the gas generators at tea time.

While the firefighters will curse the winds that came through with the cool change, wind generation is of course going great guns. That means when temperatures in Adelaide fall, the turbines across South Australia’s mid north spin up to drive cheap energy across the country.

For further reading, see my recent piece on how to protect home batteries from extreme heat.