Cape Town - The failure of one of Koeberg power station’s two units on Sunday could be “the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back”, plunging South Africa into stage 3 load shedding, a local energy expert warned.
Chris Yelland, an electrical engineer and analyst, said on Monday morning that with no reserves, the grid was on the edge after another 930 megawatts (around 3 percent of the national grid) was taken offline due to a technical fault on the main generator’s transformer at the Cape Town power station.
However, Eskom said they were on target to meet the country’s energy needs on Monday.
In a press statement, the power company said the bust unit had been scheduled for maintenance on February 9 before it was taken down.
“The maintenance team will determine if the unit can be brought back in the next few days or taken out for its planned maintenance earlier than scheduled.”
While Unit 2 is operating at full capacity, Eskom has called on residents to use electricity sparingly.
This followed last week when technical faults saw load shedding taking place throughout the week, with neighbourhoods such as Sea Point switched off for over eight hours.
Restaurants in the coastal residential area said they were forced to shut their doors and take a financial hit during the blackout which took place during their lucrative business hours, between 6pm and 8.30pm.
Yelland has warned that the situation might only get worse.
“It depends on how badly damaged this transformer is… If it’s a write-off, it’s not exactly something you can pick up at the local store… It could take weeks to replace.”
Last year Eskom was plagued by various issues as it grappled with ageing infrastructure and the country’s growing demand. In March, four units at Eskom’s Kendall power station were shut down after the system became clogged by wet coal.
This was almost immediately followed by problems with units at the Majuba and Grootvlei power stations, leading Eskom to enforce load shedding countrywide.
Yelland said the issue was that while some of Eskom’s capacity had been restored, damaged infrastructure meant it could take years until the affected power stations were generating the same amount of electricity as before.
He said that over the past few years the energy provider had lost “several thousands of megawatts” as a result of the declining performance of the generation fleet.
And while plans were being made to address South Africa’s long-term electricity problems, in the short-term the country was set to suffer.
The energy expert said: “The bottom line is, let’s say something goes wrong and we have to take another 1 000MW off the grid”, as was the case last year, “this is the kind of series of coincidences that will push SA over the edge.”
In December, the country felt the effects of the energy crisis as it entered stage 3 of Eskom’s load shedding schedule.
Yelland said this took place during the holiday season where energy requirements were relatively low.
He said the energy provider was now scrambling to try and buy up extra capacity wherever possible, even paying big businesses to run their generators to alleviate strain from the grid.
The failure of the Koeberg unit follows news that the ANC decided to sink the Independent System Market Operator Bill which would have led to the restructuring of the electricity market, ending Eskom’s monopoly and allowing smaller businesses - such as those in the renewable energy sector - to begin supplying the national grid.
This was after President Jacob Zuma personally endorsed the bill during his State of the Nation speech four years ago, said Yelland. He said scrapping the bill would cost “South Africa dearly”.
Cape Argus