Matshela Koko
Pretoria - Human Settlements Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi either does not read, or she has a comprehension problem or is simply inept.
Despite Judge Bernard Ngoepe’s judgment of April 4 that ordered News24 to issue a corrective statement, she still persists that Eskom skimped on planned maintenance to keep the lights on during my tenure.
Despite Judge Ngoepe’s ruling, Kubayi said in an interview with Xoli Mngambi on Newzroom Afrika on June 2, in her capacity as economic head of the ANC Economic Transformation Committee, that Eskom’s problems are attributable to me.
Interestingly, on the very same morning, Refilwe Moloto hosted Mr Shamil Ishmail on her CapeTalk breakfast show to talk about PrimaResearch’s report titled “Shedding light on Eskom”. Ishmail is the director of PrimaResearch in Cape Town.
Ishmail nailed it when he told listeners that “the lack of skills and experience better explain Eskom’s poor performance than the lack of maintenance or the age of plants. There are only three plants that can be classed as ‘aged’. This notion that we have ageing coal plants is not true! They’re doing maintenance, but the operation is not up to standard. The explosion at Medupi, it was a staff error. It’s going to cost R2.5 billion to fix!”
Based on its audited financial statements, Eskom is currently exceeding its reliability objective of a planned maintenance capability loss factor (PCLF) of 10%. It has been doing so since FY2012. The average PCLF between FY2012-2021 is 10.5% against a target of 10%.
There is no lack of maintenance at Eskom. Eskom is simply not getting the desired results for its maintenance effort, which is backed up by a healthy PCLF of 10.5%. This is what Kubayi and the ANC government should be focusing on.
Eskom keeps telling South Africans that the country requires an additional 4 000 to 6 000 megawatts (MW) of new generation capacity over and above what is required by the IRP2019.
What Eskom is effectively telling South Africans is that a PCLF of 10% is no longer good enough to keep the lights on and to maintain a load factor of 1% on the emergency diesel generators. They are effectively targeting a PCLF of 12-13%. In FY2016, we executed a PCLF of 13%. At peak of the maintenance season, we had 3 000 artisans on the turbine centreline alone. During off peak, we had 1 800 turbine artisans.
It was a stretch, and I now know that a PCLF of 12-13% is simply not doable. Eskom has no choice but to stop putting the current PCLF of 10.5% to waste. With a PCLF of 10.5%, and competent operational engineering support, together enabled by a strong culture of operational discipline, the plant breakdowns should never exceed 4 600MW, especially in winter.
The plant breakdowns, as measured by the unplanned capability loss factor (UCLF), should not exceed 10% of the nominal installed capacity.
The plant breakdowns of 15 000 to 17 000MW in winter are the consequences of critical components in the power stations failing and the extremely high operational excursions. The critical components are clearly not receiving priority attention from the Eskom senior executives and the Eskom board.
Their total focus is rather on growing the pace and scale of the renewable energy independent power producers. They seem to have given up on fixing the Eskom coal fleet.
Kubayi and her colleagues in the ANC should direct the leadership of Eskom to familiarise themselves with reliability and risk analysis techniques such as Hazard and Operability Study (HAZOP), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Failure Modes and Effects Criticality Analysis (FMECA).
Most importantly, they must also know how to use a multi-criteria decision method, the Analytic Network Process (ANP), to rank the most critical components so that these components can receive the quality of maintenance they require to keep them reliable.
Until then, the blackouts will remain while the already ailing economy becomes a casualty.
Pretoria News