Power cuts just a hint of possible 'catastrophe'

Load-shedding is on the cards for at least this week, but experts fear Eskom is in a crisis worse than that of 2008.

The state-owned energy company started cutting electricity supply to large parts of the country yesterday because it could take months to repair its power station damaged at the weekend.

A silo that stores about 10000 tons of coal cracked and collapsed at the Majuba power station, near Volksrust in Mpumalanga, disabling the conveyer belts that feed the plant coal. The collapse resulted in a loss of between 1800 megawatts and 3600MW of power.

Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger said yesterday that the utility could not "possibly say" how long it would take to "get things back to normal".

But prepare for load-shedding tonight, on Wednesday night and for the whole of Thursday, said Steve Lennon, group executive of sustainability at Eskom.

Energy analyst Ted Blom calls it a "catastrophe".

In 2008, he said, Eskom's problem was merely a coal shortage due to mismanagement, and this could be fixed within weeks.

"The current problem is much bigger. Eskom has lost generation capacity faster than it can build new generation capacity."

If it were not for gas-fired peak generators, Eskom would have a reserve margin of zero, said Blom.

The company had lost two 600MW units at its Duvha power station in Mpumalanga in the past two years, was behind with planned maintenance of about 4000MW and had unplanned maintenance outages of 4000MW as at last week, he said.

Add to this the 1800MW Eskom admitted it had lost at Majuba.

South Africa's week-day peak demand is about 33000MW.

"We could be more than 10000MW short, a catastrophe, which will need rotational load-shedding on a weak grid - expect more grid meltdowns. This is a national emergency," Blom said.

Eskom told reporters yesterday that the collapse of the coal silo was an "isolated incident" and that engineers were on site at Majuba.

Thava Govender, group executive of generation at Eskom, said 15 to 16 trucks were needed an hour to transport coal and feed it to the station. This should be sufficient to keep the two units running - both were running at a half-load, of 300MW each.

Trade union Solidarity blames a skills shortage for the collapse. According to the union's head of industry, Deon Reyneke, it has been warning Eskom for seven years that it is bleeding vital skills in maintaining its assets.

"To repair this silo will be months of work, which means that maintenance at other operations will suffer," said Reyneke.

Majuba is the youngest of Eskom's power stations, just 13 years old. The silo has a life span of 50 years, according to Eskom, and was inspected in September last year.

Blom reckons the damage at Majuba will take at least 90 days to repair or circumvent.

Delays in building of new stations have squeezed Eskom's reserve margin. Medupi is years behind schedule and costing billions more than originally planned.

Last week, Eskom said Medupi's first unit would be at full throttle only by the middle of next year, another delay. The Kusile power station is 18 months behind Medupi.

But Blom said: "Even if both Medupi and Kusile were working full blast [today, this] load-shedding could not be avoided. This is a very bad situation for the country."