Sea World closed today

[Gold Coast Amusement Force]

[pushbutton]

Wet & Wild closed due to no water supply, then Sea World due to no power. Both within about a week or so. 

Just unlucky coincidence I'm sure, but not good, especially both incidents being during peak holiday season. 

 

[iwerks]

Don’t GC parks have their own generators?

[westical]

11 minutes ago, iwerks said:

Don’t GC parks have their own generators?

You realise how much power an entire theme park needs, right?

[Gold Coast Amusement Force]

The backup generators are being used for animal enclosures. And possibly the resort is being partially powered

Edited January 20, 2019 by Gold Coast Amusement Force

[Thrill Seeker]

This happend at DW last year wasn’t till about 12/1pm that the park opened with limited rides on generators.

Edited January 20, 2019 by Thrill Seeker

[iwerks]

47 minutes ago, westical said:

You realise how much power an entire theme park needs, right?

Yeah, sorry, I was talking about Sea World. 

No, I was just wondering why a proper theme park doesn’t have its own power supply and an ‘amusement park’ like Adventure World generates enough power to sell it back to the grid. Are the GC parks that poor?

Edited January 20, 2019 by iwerks

[Thrill Seeker]

There just to big to produce enough power for everything

[westical]

53 minutes ago, iwerks said:

No, I was just wondering why a proper theme park doesn’t have its own power supply and an ‘amusement park’ like Adventure World generates enough power to sell it back to the grid.

Source?

[Tim Dasco]

Comment removed

Edited January 20, 2019 by Tim Dasco

[iwerks]

24 minutes ago, westical said:

Source?

We were talking to the GM of AW the other week about a certain part of the park that has enough power to supply 5 rides when he told us that they sometimes supply the grid.

[T-bone]

Well you see that’s the difference between a water park and a theme park...

[iwerks]

36 minutes ago, T-bone said:

Well you see that’s the difference between a water park and a theme park...

You can talk to the GM and CEO? They future proofed the park?

It’s funny that this ‘water park’ has more dry thrill rides than that marine wildlife park.

[Brad2912]

I don’t think you compare the electricity needs of AW vs SW. it’s entitely unproportionate. 

Wouldn’t be surprised if Shark Bay, Polar Bear Shores & the Penguin Exhibit  in isolation utilise more power than the whole of AW... 

[T-bone]

You mean more amusement rides? I find it funny how butt hurt you get over the tiniest dig at Adventure World. 

Even if you classed AW as a higher class park (say an action park) it doesn’t change the fact that a park like Sea World has much higher power consumption requirements compared to Adventure World, so its like comparing apples with vomit.

Edited January 20, 2019 by T-bone

[iwerks]

Yeah, I don’t deny that those animal exhibits would need a lot of power and that the two parks are very different. It was just weird as we had just had that conversation with Ross, the GM, and had presumed that the GC parks would be similar. 

[Levithian]

Multiple substations on site and their own feeders from the network thats not providing the suburbs nearby. Thats probably a good indication how much power the parks use. 

Might not have the rides at seaworld and wet n wild, but pumps and filtration suck down the juice before you even talk about heating or cooling the water too. 

Hate to think what a daily power bill would be worth. 

[Thrill Seeker]

 

7 hours ago, Levithian said:

Hate to think what a daily power bill would be worth. 

Dreamworld must be huge, TT2 can power a school for the day for each trip it takes

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

20 hours ago, iwerks said:

No, I was just wondering why a proper theme park doesn’t have its own power supply and an ‘amusement park’ like Adventure World generates enough power to sell it back to the grid. Are the GC parks that poor?

I own a little Honda 2Kva. It operates all the appliances in my caravan. Sometimes, I even let other people camping nearby plug into it too.

But I can't afford a generator to power everything in my house.

I can use the little honda to keep my fridge running though...

19 hours ago, iwerks said:

We were talking to the GM of AW the other week about a certain part of the park that has enough power to supply 5 rides when he told us that they sometimes supply the grid.

How cost inefficient.

Edited January 20, 2019 by AlexB

[webslave]

22 minutes ago, AlexB said:

How cost inefficient.

I can certainly imagine it looks that way at first glance, but there's usually a little bit more to it.  Generator power is not as cost-prohibitive as it sometimes sounds and really comes down to the economics of what failure is going to cost you.  Having the park go down for the day has a direct and an indirect cost associated with it and I wouldn't be surprised if the combined cost would make having your own generator infrastructure look attractive.

Another industry that uses a fair bit of juice is data centers.  These have significant generator installations (catering for generator redundancy), and because they are significant users of power they have a close relationship with their electricity supplier (as you'd imagine a theme park likely would).  It's not at all uncommon for data centers to be requested by the distributor to disconnect from the grid in advance of periods that are expected to be high-demand.  In other circumstances you can find that it can be cheaper to operate for a period of time on generator power rather than grid power.  AEMO actually makes their data public on pricing for electricity here; https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-dashboard.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

I had meant feeding supply back to the grid.

If they have such excess supply that they can feed the grid, the set up is probably a little too large. Additionally, given the power suppliers all have many trailer mounted backup generators (usually used to power a suburb when the main feed lines are shut down for maintenance), surely it would be cheaper for them to run their own units than to pay a third party to feed the grid?

By what has been said above, the system at AW doesn't power the entire park either (only '5 rides') - so now i'm sensing contradiction.

 

[RossL]

It sounds like it is solar without batteries at AW.

So probably not remotely a solution for Sea World...

[webslave]

2 hours ago, AlexB said:

I had meant feeding supply back to the grid.

If they have such excess supply that they can feed the grid, the set up is probably a little too large. Additionally, given the power suppliers all have many trailer mounted backup generators (usually used to power a suburb when the main feed lines are shut down for maintenance), surely it would be cheaper for them to run their own units than to pay a third party to feed the grid?

By what has been said above, the system at AW doesn't power the entire park either (only '5 rides') - so now i'm sensing contradiction.

 

Yeah, it's unusual, however in the case of a problem you never want to rely on the trailer mobs since that's when demand is at peak.  You can sometimes eek out a small profit on the spot price by running your own gensets, but the 'profit' is small and unlikely to be worthwhile unless you've got a real sweetheart deal with the local disty (and, depending on location you might if there's not a lot of other industry around you to shed or feed from).  It's more common for solar setups (as RossL mentioned).

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

1 hour ago, RossL said:

It sounds like it is solar without batteries at AW.

So probably not remotely a solution for Sea World...

I've had a look at Nearmap. There is no solar within the perimeter of the AW facilities.

Theres a 383 panel array on the roof of the Ice rink down the road, and 40 panels on what looks like the main hall at the Perth Waldorf school - but no solar.

I'm fairly certain based on conversations here and off-board that the claim is AW has large power generators, not solar farms.

While I am aware that AW had upgraded the supply into the park, as its previous supply was inadequate for the new attractions it had installed, and with that i've no doubt they probably brought in a padmount sub or similar, I cannot see anywhere on the park's grounds where they could be housing a generator of the size claimed.

I'm quite happy to be shown to be incorrect by evidence, but i'm doubtful of this claim as it stands.

[RossL]

1 hour ago, AlexB said:

I'm quite happy to be shown to be incorrect by evidence, but i'm doubtful of this claim as it stands.

Fair enough, selling power back into the grid must be rare then (only at peak prices), as it generally wouldn't make sense.

Whatever the case AW is no better than Sea World, as they clearly can't power the entire park on their generators alone either.  And not sure how traditional power generators are really "future-proofing" either.