Melbourne is melting while the temperatures reached 35C by 8am on Friday8 and hovered around 30C overnight. Australia hasn’t seen a day this hot since Black Saturday in 2009, when 173 people were killed by fire, say the experts from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).
The heatwave has moved to Melbourne in mid-summer days, and the city residents are facing the hottest Friday since Black Saturday in 2009. On January 25, the temperatures reached 44C, which set a new record for this Australian city in a decade. These days were totally busy for the Australian Energy Market Operator, which did its best to supply Melbourne with enough quantity of the electricity. despite the efforts, the local electricity grid was knocked out with 100,000 homes losing power.
Energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio told 3AW radio that Melbourne has aging coal-fired power stations, which are becoming less reliable. During his interview on Friday morning, she added she “can’t rule out brown-outs” with three generators across the Yallourn and Loy Yang A power stations out of action. In other words, that means the state is down more than 1000MW of power generation capacity.
Australia’s electricity grid becomes less reliable year to year, said energy minister
The Australian Energy Market Operator said it was not expecting blackouts on Friday, while Bureau of Meteorology expects the sweltering night would have set records for high minimum overnight temperatures.
BoM records are taken in 24-hour intervals from 9am to 9am, and in some places — such as Shepparton in northeast Victoria, which was 27.8C at 9am on Thursday but did not dip below 29.1C overnight — that meant minimum temperature records remained intact.
For now, number 1 thing to do in Melbourne is to drink water, say the experts. The tennis players at the Grand Slam tennis tournament are cooling themselves with the help of the water dust fans and ice.
