Grid is under pressure, but ‘no immediate risk of load shedding’

Tags

---

01-04-2014
Read : 179 times
BusinessDay
Source

SOUTH Africa’s tight power system was compounded on Tuesday morning by an "overpressurisation incident" on a boiler at Eskom’s Duvha power station, but there was no immediate load shedding risk, the state power utility said.

South Africans and South African industry face a tough winter as the country has been on tight power supply since load shedding in 2008 cost the economy billions as demand outstripped supply, and Eskom resorted to load shedding in March for the first time in six years.

Tuesday is the first day in action as acting CE for Collin Matjila, an Eskom board member and also CEO of the Congress of South African Trade Unions’ (Cosatu’s) investment arm, Kopano ke Matla, a position that has seen the Democratic Alliance say he is unsuitable to lead Eskom due to a conflict of interest. Cosatu is in an alliance with the ruling African National Congress, which means Mr Matjila "has major access to government decisions".

Eskom’s media desk said the incident at the 3,600 megawatt (MW) coal-fired power station, occurred just before midnight on Monday and would "add more pressure to an already tight system, however, there is no immediate risk of load shedding at this time".

A boiler was damaged and one person was treated for dust inhalation. There were no other injuries.

"The reason for the boiler over pressurisation is being investigated. Eskom engineers haven been on site today and have undertaken a preliminary assessment whilst the boiler cools down enough for a full assessment to be undertaken. The results of this assessment and the implications of this incident will be reported once available," Eskom said.

South Africa’s tight power supply is largely due to Eskom not having built new power generation capacity in more than a decade to 2005, when its R385bn new generation capacity build programme kicked off. The utility wants to secure much more funding — possibly surpassing R1-trillion by 2026.

On Monday Eskom announced that a unit at its only nuclear power plant, Cape Town’s Koeberg, was shut down for its 20th refuelling outage, having been online for 484 days since November 25 2012, when it was returned to operation after a previous outage. The previous record for uninterrupted power supply from a Koeberg unit was for 454 days of uninterrupted operation set between June 2000 and September 2001.

The unit shutdown on Monday also held a record for an uninterrupted run from one refuelling outage to the next.

The unit operated with a load factor of 97.1% for this period, and sent out 10,490,917MWh to the grid. The production cycle included a two-month period of coast-down at the end of the cycle. This results in the unit output slowly reducing from 100% to about 60% before shutdown, and hence the final load factor was below 100%, Eskom.