Converting chaos into electricity
● When Kobus Steyn’s contract to run a power station in the Philippines came to an end last year, instead of renewing it he decided to return to South Africa to pitch in where he could to help his embattled former employers.
And, with more than 30 years of experience since his early days as a junior engineer at Eskom, he was well-equipped for the job.
Steyn grew up in Sasolburg. “My father worked for Sasol, and when I was about three years old, he resigned and started working for Eskom at Highveld, a power station that has since been demolished.”
When he was “about six”, his father moved to Arnot power station, where construction had just started.
Steyn had a choice of two bursaries after finishing high school in 1981. “One was from Eskom, and the other from Sasol. The Eskom bursary had more value, so I decided on that.”
After his University of Pretoria studies in electronic engineering, where he specialised in control systems in his final years, Steyn joined the army for two years before starting work at Kendal power station as a young engineer in 1988.
Last year, some 35 years later, he returned to Kendal after a three-year stint in the Philippines — this time as the man in charge.
“We have six units,” he said. “Currently four are running, with two on long-term planned outages for maintenance. Our current energy availability factor is 46%. I have been here now for a year and two months. When I arrived, chaos reigned. There were multiple crises every day. And I’m not talking about Mickey Mouse crises — serious stuff.
“We talk about a multiple-unit trip when two or more units trip. In my experience, this is something that will happen maybe once in five years at a power station. In my first four months at Kendal, we had seven incidents of this magnitude. I have never seen something like that in my career.”
The loss of multiple units is problematic. “If you lose three or four units at the same time, it will take you four or five days to get all of them back on load.”
New problems kept mushrooming. “While you are trying to stabilise these units, something else will go down. We spent most of our time in firefighting mode. You could never go sit and just do planning if emergency situations kept popping up.”
But experienced hands make light work. “It helps that I know this station intimately, and I’ve always been willing to carry more risk on a higher level than my team,” Steyn said. “At one stage, we had an issue getting coal into the station, and the advice from our engineers was to take our five operational units down.
“I denied the request, telling my people to keep them running until they trip. By the time we had new coal, we had only lost one of the units [owing to] a trip.”
He is still not sure how many of his earlier problems were caused by sabotage.
“I can tell you that so many things going wrong in such a short space of time has been unprecedented in my career of more than 30 years. You do sometimes have a ripple effect, where something that goes wrong affects another part of the station, causing an issue there that spreads further. But what I experienced here was something else.
“I remember specifically one incident where we had 15 things go wrong that could not have been influenced by each other in any way. These were not caused by any ripple effect. I am talking about separate incidents preventing us from bringing in coal, water and oil. This couldn’t have been coincidental.”
The basic condition of the station was very poor. “It was dirty, so when something went wrong it was sometimes difficult to find the problem.”
The impact of dirt on a power station’s operations can be critical. “To give you an example, some of the gears in our mills use a specific type of grease. Because the plant was not cleaned properly, ash got into this grease. Ash might be very fine, but it is composed of about 65% aluminium oxide, so it is very abrasive,” he said. The ash contaminated the grease used to lubricate the mills, leading to serious breakdowns.
“We lost quite a few mills for this reason.” But things are changing. “My first priority was to find stability amid all the chaos. We needed space to breathe and plan. After that, we had to get some key people who were not performing out. This has been an ongoing process, but we are slowly starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”