Kusile Power Station: Repairs on track, fully operational by April 2024

Kusile Power Station, currently facing severe operational challenges, received a visit from Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, the minister responsible for electricity.

Ramokgopa’s visit included an in-depth status report on the steps being taken to restore four units at Kusile by December 2023.

Kusile Power Station visit:

The visit comes at a crucial time: At the time of publishing, Eskom’s capacity took a dip of 2 400MW, as three of the power station’s units are offline.

The unexpected outage is due to a flue gas duct failure which happened in October 2022. However, there’s a silver lining.

The offline units are slated to be back up and running later this year.

The plan was to build temporary flues for these three units to allow repairs to the main chimney, which is shared by all three units.

According to Eskom, this could take between 10 and 12 months.

Ramokgopa at Kusile

Addressing the media from Kusile, Ramokgopa said repairs are still on track to be finalised between November and December this year.

This will include bringing units one, two and tree back online. He said unit five will be “fully running by April 2024”.

“The confirmation we got is that we’ll start doing the tests on unit five by October this year, and have it fully running by April of next year.

Kusile repairs ‘on track’

He said they are “on track to deliver as promised and we are confident in our ability to deliver”.

Kusile is important, it’s on a critical path and I’m grateful for the progress here.

During his time at Kusile, Ramokgopa was also given a first-hand look at the ongoing construction project currently taking place at the power station.

In an effort to address South Africa’s load shedding crisis, government began making moves to enhance the performance of Eskom’s existing coal fleet.

State of SA’s energy crisis

Ramokgopa’s visit is part of a broader initiative to make sure Kusile can produce the required megawatts without any hitch.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s power stations are operating at a reduced capacity, with breakdowns amounting to 16 486MW and an additional 3 817MW out of service for planned maintenance.

Just in the last day, a generation unit at the Duvha Power Station had to be taken offline due to a breakdown.

Plus, delays in bringing units back online at Arnot, Camden, Kendal, Tutuka and two units at Hendrina power stations are contributing to the capacity issues.