Too late for Eskom to try and fix old power stations, says expert

Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan promised in 2019, he would keep the lights on, but it seems things have gone from bad to worse, as South Africa waits for him to fulfil his promise.

Experts say it’s time to get replacement fleets.

Renewable energy consultant Clyde Mallinson called for action from Eskom and said it’s too late for the power utility to try and fix the old power stations, as something needs to be done quickly.

“The briefing today confirmed all of my fears. I’ve been saying for a very long time that, irrespective of undertaking deep maintenance, if you skip the maintenance you make it very difficult if not impossible to catch up,” he said.

On Monday, Eskom executives briefed the media on the state of the power system and said, although a number of Eskom units were still unreliable, the power utility was driving improvements through maintenance.

They often delayed maintenance due to the constrained system.

“Currently, with generation, we are going through a tough time. It is just taking longer than we envisaged,” chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer said.

The planned maintenance at units had a negative impact on the energy availability factor (EAF) in the short term, but in the long term helped ensure sustainability of the system. The EAF was at 65.3%, a “poor performance” relative to the target of 70%.

He said Eskom was prioritising its reliability maintenance programme, which was not a once-off but ongoing.

“Our generation business remains a concern, mainly due to its age and a legacy of poor maintenance,” Oberholzer said.

Mallinson said the power utility needed a completely different plan of attack: “You don’t put in new to replace what breaks but you put in new to make space for things to be shut down.”

He said Eskom should be creating headroom by building new power stations to allow the old ones to be retired, not scramble to fix what breaks.

“We need to treat this as the emergency it is, and two years after the initiation of the so-called emergency programme, we haven’t put a spade into the ground yet. It is pathetic,” Mallinson said.

“We need to be installing new capacity on the grid as soon as possible. We cannot quickly build nuclear or new coal… It’s past necessary to start implementing renewable energy.”

He said although yesterday’s presentation was honest, it was also desperate and if Eskom did not do anything new, “we are going to run down the last 50 years of our fleets and we won’t have anything to replace them with, [which] will shut down the economy”.

Mallinson said the situation was dire and would only get worse.

“Eskom is short of funds and when you take an old power station and do deep maintenance on it, guess what happens? You discover a lot of things that need replacing but you haven’t got the funds to replace them.

“It’s so bad that it’s not going to improve and I’m not even talking about the fact Medupi has been down for two years.”

Energy expert Ted Blom said there was no substance to the plan. Eskom was doing patch jobs and the fact that its skilled people were resigning showed it was a sinking ship.

“They keep telling us Eskom is forward, but it’s actually going backwards. There are clearly big problems,” he said.

“The damage has been done, as [group executive of generation Philip] Dukashe said, there’s a problem in the system. Eskom needs at least two years of planning and R600 billion before they can start fixing up the machines.”

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za