Johannesburg - Eskom sees a low chance of further rolling blackouts in South Africa next week even as the collapse of a silo at its second-biggest plant makes the country’s power grid more susceptible to risks.
“The system is tight; I know this has become a mantra,” Steve Lennon, group sustainability executive at the state-owned utility, told reporters today in Johannesburg.
Using power sparingly is “really a message we’d like all South Africans to take on board.
The system is more vulnerable to variations, more vulnerable to extreme weather events.”
South African residents and businesses faced rolling outages to cut power usage on November 2 after a coal-storage facility at the Majuba plant cracked and fell on to conveyors that feed its six generating units a day earlier.
A recovery operation at the station has raised production to 1 600 megawatts, or 40 percent of its installed capacity.
Cash-strapped Eskom is struggling to meet demand for power after a decade of underinvestment in new generation left an aging fleet of 27 plants with an installed capacity of 42 000 megawatts.
Typically, a third of this is undergoing maintenance at any one time.
The shortage of electricity is stifling growth in Africa’s second-largest economy, which is forecast to expand at the slowest pace this year since a recession in 2009.
“The system operates with no reserve margin, that’s how tight the system is,” group executive for generation Thava Govender said today, referring to peak demand in the evenings.
“When you’re sitting at an aging fleet, you’re running it at a very high load factor.”
Investigation Duration
A probe into the collapse will take about three months to six months to complete, with Eskom entailing help from independent international experts, Govender said.
The 13-year-old Majuba facility, in the eastern Mpumalanga province, is South Africa’s biggest plant after the 4 116- megawatt Kendal facility, according to Eskom’s website.
One megawatt is enough to power about 200 middle-income South African homes at peak times.
The Majuba silo, designed to last 50 years, was last inspected in September 2013, when no signs of deterioration or structural damage were detected, Govender said.
Eskom is providing coal to Majuba’s units with trucks, and expects this solution to be in place for six months.
A more permanent plan will be ready in two years, Govender said.
South Africa will raise at least 20 billion rand by selling shares in listed companies, stakes in state-owned entities and real estate to finance a bailout for Eskom, which has to plug a 225 billion-rand cashflow gap over the five years through March 2018, the National Treasury said last month.
Power tariffs will rise an average 13 percent from April, more than the 8 percent planned, to help the company recover 7.8 billion rand of unbudgeted costs incurred in the three years through March 2013, the national energy regulator said in October.
The inflation rate was 5.9 percent in September.
There will be “major” capital-expenditure and project- management implications from the recovery in the longer term if the company is going to rebuild the Majuba silo infrastructure, chief executive Tshediso Matona said. - Bloomberg News