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Subscriber only Queensland should prepare for rolling blackouts and not use electricity between now and 9pm where possible, the Australian Energy Market Operator has warned. It comes after power was cut to hundreds of thousands of Queensland and northern NSW homes and businesses after explosions at Callide Power Station in central Queensland. A total of 477,000 homes and businesses across the states were impacted after multiple explosions around 2pm, with most of the outages lasting until about 4pm. The Australian Energy Market Operator, in its latest statement, said there was not enough power to meet demand following the incident at the Callide Power station, shaking the reliability of the system.
Almost half a million homes and businesses across Queensland and northern NSW were without power after major explosions at Callide Power Station. There are reports of chaos on roads and people trapped in high-rise elevators.
26 May 2021
Yesterday, a fire at the Queensland Callide C coal plant caused the facility to suddenly snap offline. That triggered a cascade of flow-on events, including the disconnection of multiple transmission lines, and other generators, along with a huge ‘frequency excursion‘, in which the normal operating state of the grid begins to stray outside safe parameters.
Nearly half a million customers were disconnected, including Brisbane airport, sewage pumps in the Gold Coast, Gold Coast University Hospital (which had to rely on backup generators) and traffic lights. “About 360 traffic intersections across the Brisbane metro region lost power just after 2:00pm, causing “chaos” for drivers ahead of school pick-up time”, wrote the ABC. People were briefly trapped inside a shopping centre.