ESKOM plunges South Africa into darkness again
ESKOM on Sunday, November 2, 2014 warned of tight supplies in the months through to February next year as it begins to implement rolling blackouts this week to compensate for damage caused by a collapsed coal silo at its Majuba operation in Mpumalanga.
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Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth have been warned of rolling blackouts after Eskom lost 1800MW when the silo at Majuba cracked and collapsed.
“The power will be cut between 6 p.m and 8 p.m. today; between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Wednesday and the whole day on Thursday. The outages could last the rest of the week,” Eskom warned.
The damage over the weekend which new Chief Executive Tshedisa Matona dubbed his baptism of fire comes on the heels of technical glitches last week which compelled the power utility to ask its industrial users to cut consumption by about 10 per cent.
The power cuts have placed the spotlight on Eskom’s ailing infrastructure and the increase in the number of unplanned outages this year.
“We have to constantly struggle with security of electricity supply, without compromising maintenance of our plants and putting Eskom into bankruptcy,” Steve Lennon, Group Executive for Sustainability said at yesterday’s press conference at Megawatt Park.
Eskom was earlier this year forced to implement managed blackouts for the first time since 2008 as it struggles to meet demand with an ageing fleet. Large industrial users, including steelmaker ArcelorMittal’s local unit and BHP Billiton, the world’s biggest mining company, are required to reduce demand to avoid a total collapse of the grid.
Explanation
According to Eskom, the problems that surfaced within the last week have disrupted a well drawn up summer plan for keeping the light on, but the system would be tight.
“The month of November, half of December, January and February will be tight. Eskom will not compromise its generation plant and will load shed if necessary to protect the power system from total collapse,” Lennon said.
The silo fell on to the conveyor at the 13-year-old Majuba power plant, cutting supply of the fuel to all of the plant’s six units, the company said. The utility is cutting as much as 2000MW of capacity through rotational blackouts.
The Majuba facility has design capacity for 4110MW, making it South Africa’s biggest plant after the 4116MW Kendal facility, according to Eskom’s website.
Eskom has arranged trucks to bring supply to two of the three feeders at Majuba, running at 16 vehicles per hour per feeders, Govender said.
Units one and two share a feeder as do units five and six. He said Unit four was out for maintenance and unit three will eventually be cross-fed using supplies to the other boilers.
Eskom’s construction of two more coal fired plants of about 4800MW each, to be Africa’s largest, has been beset by delays. One megawatt is enough to power about 200 middle-income homes at peak times.
“Eskom has zero reserve margins and hence any incident now threatens power supply”, Anton Eberhard, a National Planning Commission member and professor at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of business, stated via e-mail yesterday.
South Africa will raise at least R29 billion by selling shares in listed companies, stakes in state-owned entities and real estate to finance a bailout for Eskom, which has to plug a R225bn cash flow gap over the five years through March 2018.
Timeline
February:
Three government departments are roped in to find money to enable Eskom to keep the lights on and a tariff increase cannot be ruled out. Eskom scales back investment plans because of lower than anticipated revenue.
March:
Eskom declares a fresh power emergency and says there is a strong possibility it would have to implement rolling blackout.
June:
Eskom declares a series of power emergencies.
October:
Moody’s Investors Service downgrades the senior unsecured bond rating of Eskom by one notch to Baa3 from Baa2
• Fitch Ratings kept at BBB+ after the government pledged at least R20 billion in cash and other support for the power utility
• South Africa’s power supply is “severely constrained” and will remain so for a week because of technical problems, says Eskom.
November:
Majuba power station experiences problems as coal silo collapses.
Culled from Business Report
South Africa’s national financial daily.