Load-shedding: Kusile power plant has not supplied power for five days

As the country experiences the first of five days of load-shedding, it was revealed that the Kusile power plant has not been generating power for nearly a week.

Speaking during a virtual briefing on Wednesday morning, Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer said the power utility suffered “sustained challenges” with the Duvha, Tutuka and Kendal power stations.

And he admitted that they had not anticipated challenges at the Kusile power plant, which had no units running besides Kusile 1, which he said came on and went off a few times in the past five days.

This means that the station has not produced any power for five days.

Kusile is a 4,800MW coal-fired power station near Emalahleni in Mpumalanga, which is the country's largest construction project which is still under development. It has six 800MW units.

The challenges at Kusile were related to the axillary steam boilers. Steam from working boilers power other unit boilers. Now that all units are dead it is difficult to get the power station back on again. 

But, he said, with the help of specialised resources on site on Tuesday, the entity may have been able to resolve these issues.

Oberholzer said that besides the four big power stations, there are two others which are “usually reliable”. 

He said Matimba and Majuba power stations had also experienced tripping because of systems which are up for replacement.

He said Eskom needed time to recover emergency supplies as well as the successful return of the units that were in breakdown.

“And then also, very annoyingly, we do have some units that are on slip. So from a production point of view they were planned to return at a certain time. Based on that production plan, other units would then be released to be maintained. So that is really an annoying aspect that we are dealing with,” he said.

He said this was linked to maintenance that the entity was not ready for.

“It is really difficult if you do not have an outage readiness ... However, we will continue with the maintenance even though we find ourselves in the situation where we are now. We will not sacrifice the reliability maintenance in the investment in the future,” he said.

He apologised for the load-shedding but said that this was where SA was at and “we need to work our way out of it”.

On Wednesday a total of 13,461MW of capacity was unavailable due to the unplanned outages.

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