South Africa’s electricity minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has announced that Eskom does not have the necessary electricity generation capacity to prevent the country from going into stage 8 loadshedding this winter.
Also read: Eskom proposes power outages of up to 32 hours to prevent grid collapse
Ramokgopa’s statement follows Eskom’s recent warning of the increased possibility of implementing stage 8 loadshedding due to the rising electricity demand caused by the cold winter weather. The country’s likelihood of being plunged into stage 8 loadshedding grows if unplanned breakdowns reach 18 000MW and an additional 4 000MW is taken offline for maintenance purposes.
After a visit to the Kusile power station in Mpumalanga, Ramokgopa reported that three of the power station’s units are currently out of operation due to a flue gas duct (chimney) failure that dates back to October. This failure has resulted in a loss of 2 400MW in generation capacity for Eskom, with an additional unit that has also been taken offline.
Ramokgopa stated that if the four offline units at Kusile were operational, they would have contributed 800MW each to the national grid, significantly alleviating loadshedding by at least three stages.
The Kusile Power Station is one of Eskom’s two recently built power stations, comprising six coal-fired generating units, each with a capacity of 800MW, resulting in a total generating capacity of 4 800MW. Unfortunately, the station has encountered persistent design flaws, necessitating an additional expenditure of R14 billion to complete the construction. As a result, the total cost of building the station has escalated to an astonishing amount of over R175 billion since the commencement of construction in 2007.
As reported by IOL, Ramokgopa said, ‘Kusile is a critical part to the easing the load shedding crisis. If we were to get these units back, I think we would have made significant advances.
‘Last time I was here, management indicated that they will be bringing those three units back (online). The last one will be brought back on December 24; the last one of the three will be back on-stream by November 28, 2023 and the second one by December 11.’
‘The confirmation we got is that we will start doing tests on Unit 5 by October. We are confident that we will have it fully running by April next year.’
While Ramokgopa expressed that three units at Kusile would be restored and operational later this year, he acknowledged the potential for more severe stages of loadshedding during the winter season.
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