Coal and Gas fire plants are now not finding it economical to maintain a plant properly now.
They are running them into the ground.
But when we need them they are not available thanks to short term oversupply that is dumping on the Energy market.
We are heading into a dangerous place. And West Australians are waking up to it.
The rise of solar power is jeopardising the WA energy grid, and it's a lesson for all of Australia
In Western Australia, one of the sunniest landscapes in the world, rooftop solar power has been a runaway success.
On the state's main grid, which covers Perth and the populated south-west corner of the continent, almost one in every three houses has a solar installation.
Combined, the capacity of rooftop solar on the system far exceeds the single biggest generator — an ageing 854 megawatt coal-fired power station.
But there is now so much renewable solar power being generated on the grid that those responsible for keeping the lights on warn the stability of the entire system could soon be in jeopardy.
It is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country of how the delicate balancing act that is power grid management can be severely destabilised by what experts refer to as a "dumb solar" approach.
"We talk about 'smart' this and 'smart' that these days," said energy expert Adam McHugh, an honorary research associate at Perth's Murdoch University.
"Well, solar at the moment is 'dumb' in Western Australia. We need to make it smart." An isolated solar frontier
Mr McHugh's remarks come at a time of profound change in the energy industry across the globe.
But nowhere is the change being more acutely felt than in Western Australia.
Stuck out on its own at the edge of the continent, he said WA had become "a laboratory experiment in the uptake of rooftop solar".
"We're at the front of the curve, the bleeding edge," Mr McHugh said.
"The technology that we're seeing being developed rapidly around the world is flowing into Western Australia at a more rapid rate, potentially … than anywhere else on the planet."
While much of the debate about the intersection of climate and energy policy is focused on the eastern states — and its national electricity market (NEM) — WA is hurtling towards a tipping point.
At heart of the state's problem is its isolation.
Unlike states such as South Australia, which has even higher levels of renewable energy, WA cannot rely on any other markets to prop it up during times of disruption to supply or demand.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which runs WA's wholesale electricity market (WEM), said the islanded nature of the grid in WA made it particularly exposed to the technical challenges posed by solar.
AEMO chief executive Audrey Zibelman said these challenges tended to be most acute when high levels of solar output coincided with low levels of demand — typically on mild, sunny days in spring or autumn when people were not using air conditioners.
On those days, excess solar power from households and businesses spilled uncontrolled on to the system, pushing the amount of power needed from the grid to increasingly low levels.
Ms Zibelman said WA's isolation amplified this trend because the relative concentration of its solar resources meant fluctuations in supply caused by the weather had an outsized effect. Low-power days become a big problem
The only way to manage the solar was to scale back or switch off the coal- and gas-fired power stations that were supposed to be the bedrock of the electricity system.
The problem was coal-fired plants were not designed to be quickly ramped up or down in such a way, meaning they were ill-equipped to respond to sudden fluctuations in solar production.
"What's changing in the WEM is the fact that rooftop solar is now our single largest generator," Ms Zibelman said.
"That has really made a huge difference in terms of how we think about the power system.
"The concern we have for the first time in probably the history of this industry is you start thinking about sunny days during the spring or [autumn] when you don't have a lot of demand, because you don't have a lot of cooling going on.
"And that becomes an interesting issue because you have lots and lots of solar and very little demand.
"We've never worried about a system around low demand. You're always worried about the highest periods of the summer.
"What we're recognising now is that the flexibility we need in the system is one [issue] that we have to think about — how do we integrate solar and storage better? And these are new problems that we have to solve." Rolling blackouts possible within three years
In a "clarion call" earlier this year, AEMO said that if nothing was done to safeguard the grid, there was a credible danger of rolling blackouts from as early as 2022 as soaring levels of renewable energy periodically overwhelmed the system.
At worst, AEMO warned there was a "real risk" of a system-wide blackout.
