Faults, lack of repairs could mean meltdown

ESKOM chief executive Andre de Ruyter has warned South Africans they may have to live with rolling power cuts indefinitely as the power utility struggles to repair power stations supplying electricity to the national grid.

Since the beginning of this year, Eskom’s Koeberg nuclear power station in the Western Cape has been limping along with only one of its two units in operation.

Last week, De Ruyter announced the implementation of stage 2 load shedding, citing issues at Lethabo power station, while two others, Kusile and Tutuka, returned to service.

Chief operations officer John Oberholzer said the state-owned entity was still struggling, with an increased reliance on its diesel reserves and open cycle gas turbines (OCGT) generators.

At a media briefing in March this year, Oberholzer said that Eskom could see a worst-case scenario of introducing additional stages of load shedding to handle the shortage in diesel reserves.

In a more recent briefing, on Wednesday last week, Oberholzer said planned maintenance is the only realistic artillery at their disposal to return Eskom to reliable and practical standards.

This means the current load shedding schedule allows for scheduled power cuts up to stage 8 in order to pull 8 000MW off the grid for up to 12 hours. If need be, this would affect households and municipalities for days, leading up to weeks.

“Looking at the whole power station capacity, there is no efficient power supply to be pushed into the grid. The fact that we have a high demand and low output, it’s going to cause a problem where we may escalate,” said Adil Nchabeleng, president of Transform RSA.

In January, mining and power expert Ted Blom told The Free Marketeers podcast, hosted by the Free Market Foundation, that while the country’s power supplier could easily plunge the entire country into darkness, it could only be through either human error or major technological faults.

The country’s power currently comes from 15 power stations, which generate more than 80% of the electricity needed to power the country’s grid. Several of the power stations have been neglected for decades. Grappling with the issue of cable and fuse theft has left Eskom’s executive board to urgently repair infrastructure.