AT THE risk of incurring reader fatigue, we must be allowed another shot at shaming Eskom management into the proper alleviation of the dire situation in which they’ve placed the country. The latest rolling blackouts were supposedly caused by the dumber-than-dumb failure to replenish diesel fuel supplies at the gas turbine peaking stations, but those events were preceded by a series of corporate revelations that would even embarrass the president.
The first of the latest public relations disasters was some highly titled Eskom functionary telling us that the country’s power supply would only normalise once Medupi and Kusile were operational. Meanwhile, more than the capacity of either of those stations is regularly non-operational due to unplanned outages – corporate-speak for Eskom’s inability to properly maintain and operate its generating capacity.
Only once they have gotten off their corporate butts, and rectified the current situation with a provable result, should they be given the keys to Medupi: the present level of incompetence would take no longer than six to seven years to reduce Medupi to very expensive scrap.
The second was the announcement that Eskom personnel are being offered voluntary retrenchment packages in order to reduce operating costs at a time when precious experience needs to be retained: that is, unless the packages actually target those responsible for what is state-sponsored sabotage, while Eskom then hires the best power station engineers available, to supplement or replace those incapable of doing their jobs.
Instead, judging by the reaction of union Solidarity, Eskom is ridding itself of the last vestiges of its pre-1994 staff – to shoot the messenger in some vain hope that the message will go away. The power stations are, themselves, the messengers and their only message is exactly that of a human infant – regular, responsible care and appropriate fuel.
The third was the shameful admission that the conveyors, taking boiler ash to the tip at the Lethabo power station, had broken down and the operators had overloaded the ash precipitators.
The complete breakdown of the (multiple) ash conveyors causes the steam boilers to be constipated, almost literally, and there can be no relief while the posterial orifice is firmly plugged: such a complete failure was probably unheard of prior to this incident.
The net result of this “operational oversight” was a loss of anything up to 2 000 megawatts (about 6 percent of available power) from the national grid, but that was not mentioned.
In the early 1980s, I had the opportunity to observe Sasol’s struggle to reliably operate the highly intricate plant Secunda complex, including two power stations. There were errors, often embarrassments, but very rarely was an error permitted a repeat: one of the longest lasting errors, before rectification, was a basic design fault in the ash removal.
By comparison, it is as if Eskom is purposefully seeking new ways to break a power station and then honing these methods to a fine art. The only original one left is a very fatal collapse of a chimney stack. We tried it on the 310m stack at Secunda and failed, but we then didn’t work for today’s Eskom!
Oddly enough, at that time, Matla power station did have a fault in a stack, but Eskom of old managed its safe demolition and reconstruction without a single load-shedding event.
Roger Toms
Hout Bay