Kendal power station is too big to lose, but too dirty to keep using?

Eskom can’t seem to catch a break even when they are surprisingly honouring their promise of not implementing load shedding during the festive season. For now at least.

It was revealed yesterday that their Kendal power station in Mpumalanga has been served with a notice to shut down two of its units by 9 January, having not met a number of emissions and environmental compliances. Kendal is the largest indirect dry-cooled power station in the world.

“We have given plans to the authorities on what we had planned to do. We’ve met some of those plans but not all of them and I think authorities have gotten to the point where they have decided they needed to issue a compliance notice because we weren’t making the satisfactory progress on the emission reductions,” said Eskom’s environmental manager Deidre Herbst.

While Eskom is expected to oppose and appeal the department of environmental affairs’ decision on the grounds of the threat of load shedding and risks to the supply of electricity to the country, it still leaves us with a system that is vulnerable and unpredictable.

The grid is again under immense pressure due to several unplanned breakdowns. Here’s hoping sanity will prevail and Kendal will be granted an extension to fix their transgressions.

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