The truth behind Eskom's dark lies

13 December 2014 - 22:12 By Chris Barron, Tina Weavind and Isaac Mahlangu
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Eskom's top brass tripped over their words this week in a desperate bid to spin the spiralling energy supply crisis that is ripping through households and choking business ahead of Christmas.

And while Eskom revealed on Monday that power cuts would continue for months, Eskom CEO Tshediso Matona spoke of plans to put the squeeze on consumers for even more cash to pay for years of bungling at his organisation.

In an interview this week, Matona told the Sunday Times that South Africans should pay more for power because "the price is still low" - despite steep price hikes in the past five years, and another 12.6% rise due in April next year.

He insisted Eskom was "functional" despite clear evidence that it does not have the skills to face a mounting tally of breakdowns at power stations .

Matona had to eat his words from earlier this week to the effect that the power cuts were "not a crisis". In the interview he admitted that indeed "it's a crisis for the country", but added "Eskom is not in crisis".

However, Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown immediately contradicted him, saying "we are avoiding" a crisis.

"There seems to be an obsession to declare 11 days of controlled and planned load-shedding a 'crisis'. A crisis is when there are uncontrolled blackouts," the minister said.

Lies peddled by the government and Eskom as it muddles its way in the dark include:

When asked weeks ago, Eskom said it could not get diesel from PetroSA to power generators because PetroSA had run out of diesel.

And Brown also told the Sunday Times that diesel "is expensive and sometimes not available".

But PetroSA's Zama Luthuli said his company had been "able to meet its obligations to Eskom" right from when it first started making increased demands in November;

On Monday, Matona said the deadline to bring South Africa's new flagship power station, Medupi, online on Christmas Eve might not be met but that the deadline would shift to "early January".

 

Engineers at the site, however, told the Sunday Times that, thanks to Eskom's own bungling, there was no way it would get going until Easter at the earliest; and Eskom pledges it is working around the clock to keep the lights on, but it has emerged that nearly 13000 workers at Medupi in Limpopo have packed up and gone on holiday.

Unions said Eskom had not asked for workers to stay to "fast-track" the process.

At Medupi, almost no one could be seen on Thursday at the 883ha site, the equivalent of 900 rugby fields, after workers joined the exodus on Wednesday. Medupi is three years late and R30-billion over budget.

Roman Crookes, Eskom's man on the ground at Medupi, said workers wanted to go home to their families. "You can't force a person to work ... it is very difficult to keep people here."

About 60% of Medupi's workforce are "nonlocal" and live in provinces beyond Limpopo.

It was vital that the workforce was allowed to "rest and recover before returning to work for the new year". This was due to safety reasons as "fatigued workers cause safety risks", he said.

However, National Union of Mineworkers general secretary Frans Baleni said that although it was "normal at this time for construction companies to close so workers could spend time with families", Eskom had not arranged to keep any of the workers on the site.

It was an open secret among contractors at the site that Medupi's first unit, Unit 6, would not be ready before Easter.

Three senior engineers who agreed to talk to Sunday Times as long as they could not be identified said Unit 6 was a "disaster". The contractors said the new deadline for Unit 6 was "never going to be met ... at least until Easter".

The men, the newest of whom has been working at Medupi for four years, said the problem lay squarely with Eskom, which was micromanaging the entire project.

"They ... know f***-all about building power stations," he said.

"Hitachi and Alstom can't talk to each other, we have to do everything through Eskom," said one. "And you might as well talk to Ghostbusters."

 

The Sunday Times also visited six Eskom power stations this week in Mpumalanga - none of which were running at full capacity because of Eskom's bungling.

At Hendrina, four of the 10 units, representing a combined 800megawatts, were down. Two of those four units had collapsed because of preventable tube leaks.

One technician said: "I've been working at this power station for more than 25 years. We never used to have so many tube leaks in such as a short space of time."

Poor coal was being shunted into power stations because of the supply problems, he said. This was what had damaged two of the turbines at Hendrina - which could take three months to a year to repair.

Camden power station outside Ermelo has been running at only three-quarters of its 1600MW capacity since last month, thanks to a condenser tube leak.

At Majuba, where a coal storage silo collapsed last month, two units are out. It is the same story at Duvha power station in eMalahleni, which was generating only half its capacity.

Simphiwe Nkwali. 

Eskom would say only that "over the last few months, we have seen a significant increase in unplanned maintenance or breakdowns on our plants due to the fact that we have been running our plant hard and delaying critical maintenance in our past efforts to keep the lights on".

Matona also blamed politicians for the load-shedding. He said Eskom was told to keep the lights on for the 2010 World Cup and the elections, when power cuts would have cost votes.

"We delayed maintenance, and load-shedding is the price we are paying for that," he said.

Matona conceded that there were "not enough technical skills at plant level to ensure that ongoing maintenance is done".

President Jacob Zuma, finally breaking his silence on the power crisis, blamed apartheid for his government's inability to keep the lights on.

Speaking at a meeting of the Young Communist League in Cape Town on Friday, Zuma said: "The problem is that energy was structured racially to serve a particular race, not the majority, whilst there was a community sitting in the dark. Nobody thought electricity must be taken there. If there was a farmer with a different colour in the middle of that community, the lines will move across all these houses towards that house."

Zuma said 11 million South Africans now had electricity, more than twice the number in 1994.

But experts said Eskom should have foreseen the problems.

Professor Anton Eberhard of the University of Cape Town School of Business and a member of the National Planning Commission, said about a quarter of Eskom's power stations were unavailable at any one time because of breakdowns.

"The underlying reasons for these failures are poor management decisions, loss of experienced personnel and inadequate time and expenditure on maintenance," he said.

"It was also a mistake to compromise on maintenance in order to keep the lights on at all costs."

mahlangui@sundaytimes.co.za, joubertp@sundaytimes.co.za

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