Further setback for Eskom at Medupi station
THE Medupi power station’s unit 6, which was scheduled to be synchronised to the grid on Christmas Eve, may now only be synchronised as late as April.
Synchronisation is a first step in the commissioning process of the first unit of the new mega, coal-fired power station.
Eskom missed the December 24 deadline because the cleaning of debris in the boiler, left by welders, was taking longer than expected.
Eskom spokesman Khulu Phasiwe said yesterday technicians were using steam to blow out the debris, but they had said they were not comfortable going ahead with the synchronisation of the unit in December.
“Once the technicians are comfortable, they will go ahead. Our target date is the first quarter of this year,” he said.
Phasiwe was unable to say why the technicians had miscalculated the time it would take to clean the boiler.
“Sometimes you encounter delays when you try to meet deadlines.”
This comes after Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown and Eskom head Tshediso Matona announced at a visit to Medupi in September that the synchronisation of unit 6 would definitely happen on December 24, and started a well-publicised 100-day countdown.
This latest setback has pushed the completion of Medupi, already several years overdue, even further away. Former Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba said in mid-2013 that the government was “extremely disturbed” at the delays at the Medupi power plant. He said then that Medupi was expected to deliver its first power to the national grid in December 2013.
Before that, in late 2011, Eskom had said it expected Medupi’s first unit to be commissioned during 2012, with the remaining five units added at a rate of one every eight months until the entire power station was generating power by 2015. Now estimates are that it will be on full generation by 2019.
The delays have been accompanied by massive cost overruns. Estimates are that Eskom had lost about R26 billion a year in revenue, or close to R100bn in the 45 months’ delay in Medupi’s construction.
Tristen Taylor, spokesman on energy for the NGO Earthlife Africa, said the failure of Medupi to meet the December 24 deadline was not unexpected.
“This project has been riddled with delays. As long as we continue with these large-scale projects like Medupi and Kusile, we should expect cost overruns and delays. That is what happens,” Taylor said.
“What needs to happen is for Eskom to change its entire new-build model, to move away from these expensive, slow mega-plants like Medupi and Kusile, and move to electricity generation such as the government’s renewable energy programme.
“These power plants can be built quickly, with less risk, and at no capital cost to the government. Eskom should have learnt lessons from the problems with their big-build model and cranked up the smaller renewable programme, but our fear is that these lessons are not being learnt,” Taylor said.