Durban - Much like Jack and Jill, Eskom is going up and down a very big hill - but not to fetch a pail of water. Instead, the state power corporation is pumping enormous volumes of water up into the Drakensberg mountains to generate new peak-hour electricity.
To be exact, it aims to pump 10 400 Olympic-size swimming pools of water up the hill at night and then let it all run down the next day, using the gushing power of the water to spin four of South Africa’s biggest electrical motors.
The new Ingula power station, on the border between KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State, was put on the Eskom design boards 31 years ago.
Construction of the R25 billion pumped storage power scheme near Ladysmith began 11 years ago, and with work now nearing completion, President Jacob Zuma arrived there yesterday to open the plant officially barely a week before the local government elections.
Zuma said the partial commissioning of three of the station’s four generation units was “moving us a step closer to the ANC government’s dream of extending access to power to everyone”.
“The ANC is the ruling party by the way - just to remind you,” he said.
The facility is expected to be fully online by the end of this year or early next year. When complete, the units will generate a combined 1 320MW.
Earlier, Eskom officials said planning for the new pumped storage scheme began in 1985 when planners started to identify 90 potential sites across the country.
By 1995 they had narrowed down the choice to just seven sites and construction at Ingula began in 2005.
Just more than a decade later, Ingula is able to deliver electricity to the national power grid.
Ranked as the 14th-largest pumped storage scheme in the world, it will be able to deliver just over 3% of the country’s current generation capacity.
But unlike coal-fired power stations that generate electricity for most of the day, the Ingula scheme is designed specifically to quickly produce electricity during the hours of peak morning and evening power demand.
This is made possible by pumping water up to a large storage dam in the Free State and holding it there in reserve.
As the need for peak load power increases around 7am and 7pm from homes, Eskom is able to quickly release some of the water down a 4.7km-long tunnel beneath the mountains.
As it tumbles down towards a second dam in KZN, the water rotates turbine blades spinning at more than 330km/h - in turn driving massive electric motors.
Apart from the dams and power lines, very little of the power plant is visible from outside.
The heart of the power station lies deep beneath the mountain in a central chamber housing four generators each weighing 230 tons.
To create this massive space under the mountain, nearly 3 million kilograms of dynamite was used to blast away and remove 3 million tons of rock.
Eskom engineers say the void was big enough to hold 11 000 minibus taxis if they could be stacked together tightly like Lego blocks.
Also speaking at the launch ceremony yesterday, Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown said Eskom had made “excellent progress” with new power generation expansion projects over the past year, and managing to avoid any load shedding for 11 months.
By 2021, Eskom hoped to add about 8 600MW of new generation capacity through a variety of projects.
THE MERCURY