Eskom on the brink

Cape Town. 201114. Power utility Eskom has confirmed that stage one of load shedding has started. Stage one allows for up to 1000 MW of the national load to be shed. This is the third time the utility has implemented load shedding this year. Eskom earlier said it was looking into reports of another weakness found at one of its coal silos at the Majuba Power Station.The utility has been experiencing problems since the collapse of a silo at the power station in Mpumalanga earlier this month. Picture Leon Lestrade. Story Wendyll Martin

Cape Town. 201114. Power utility Eskom has confirmed that stage one of load shedding has started. Stage one allows for up to 1000 MW of the national load to be shed. This is the third time the utility has implemented load shedding this year. Eskom earlier said it was looking into reports of another weakness found at one of its coal silos at the Majuba Power Station.The utility has been experiencing problems since the collapse of a silo at the power station in Mpumalanga earlier this month. Picture Leon Lestrade. Story Wendyll Martin

Published Nov 22, 2014

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Cape Town -

It will be a miserable, damp and dark weekend for South Africans. And it won’t end there. As Eskom sought to avert a systematic failure of the fragile national power grid on Friday by restarting load shedding, experts warned that it was going to get worse – before it got better.

The power supply deteriorated so badly yesterday that the country was hanging on a knife edge, with power supply edging dangerously close to collapse. Large parts of KZN, including many suburbs in Durban, were without electricity from as early as 2pm.

Deena Govender, of eThekwini municipality’s electricity department, said the week ahead looked to be very constrained.

It took just three hours for the system to shift from stage one of load-shedding to stage two – a near calamitous point on a scale of four, an Eskom official, who could not be named, said.

Stage one means that the power utility is running short of about 1 000 megawatts of electricity, while stage two requires cutting 2 000MW. Stages three and four would mean a cataclysmic system collapse.

eThekwini municipality spokeswoman Tozi Mthethwa said customers were advised to switch-off all appliances during the outages and only restore gradually when power returned.

“Residents are urged to reduce all non-essential loads to assist us in stabilising the electricity supply grid,” she said.

Eskom said the deterioration was caused by unforeseen technical problems in generating units. Compounding the power problem, the utility said, was that some of its powers stations’ pumping storage ran out of water and diesel.

“As a country we don’t have reserve margin so if units go out we don’t have any leeway. We are running everything we have at this stage, even the peaking plants. Earlier yesterday we had all our diesel power station reserve depleted.”

Energy expert Chris Yelland said load shedding was due to Eskom’s depleted water reserves at its peaking power stations, which use water to generate electricity, and depleted diesel reserves to fire up the open-cycle gas turbines.

“These peaking plants are intended for short periods of the day, for half an hour, because they are very expensive to run. They are not designed to run continuously.

“But instead, Eskom is running these for eight or 12 hours a day. The diesel tanks have run dry. Now they have to fill them up. That takes days. They need hundreds of trucks.

“On the weekend, they can fill their dams and resupply the diesel. But by Wednesday, they run out of diesel and water. Then by Thursday, there is high demand. On Friday, the load drops and so on Saturday and Sunday they are frantically trying to pump water. And it starts all over again.

Earlier this month, a coal storage silo at Majuba power station in Mpumalanga collapsed, causing widespread power cuts. Silo 20 contained more than 10 000 tons of coal, affecting coal supplies to all six units at the power station.

This week, trade union Solidarity said Majuba’s silo 30 had a visible 2m-long crack.

Energy expert, Professor Anton Eberhard, of the National Planning Commission, who has mooted a commission of inquiry to understand the origins of the power crisis, tweeted yesterday: “Power cuts in parts of Cape Town this evening. People not happy. Watch the anger grow.” Another tweet read. “Power cuts next three days. Likely next year’s like this!”

Yesterday Natasha Michael, a DA MP, said her party was concerned about what was really going on at Eskom.

Last night, blackouts continued until 8pm. “This is how it will be for many years to come because Medupi and Kusile are running late,” said Yelland.

“In the meantime, the performance of the existing plants is just getting worse and worse because they are deferring maintenance.”

There was no short term end to the supply problem, he believed. “We are going to see load shedding become more frequent – it’s what we can expect for the next three or four years.”

Eskom hoped this weekend’s loadshedding would drop national demand by 10 percent and stabilise the power grid.

The load-shedding schedule for eThekwini municipality is available at: www.durban.gov.za/City_Services/electricity/Load_Shedding/Pages/default.aspx

- Saturday Argus

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