OUT OF STAYING POWER?

Eskom’s generation fleet is showing its age, new-build projects have yet to live up to their promise, maintenance backlogs are biting and coal supply is sketchy. It’s a mess

Entering Eskom’s Lethabo power station near Sasolburg feels a bit like an iconic scene from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic, Jurassic Park. As movie buffs will recall, the game vehicle enters the park and its occupants marvel at the size and splendour of the prehistoric animals as they emerge.

Driving past Lethabo’s six cooling towers evokes a comparable feeling. Up close, the sheer size is staggering. At the base of each tower, water gushes like an epic water feature. Above, white clouds billow out, blending into the dappled Free State sky.

Inside unit 3 of the station, the roar of the high-pressure turbine provides a backing track on the way to a control room that, with wall-towall wooden panelling, is straight out of the 1980s — which is when Lethabo’s first unit came online.

Beyond the control room is the boiler house, about 70m high, that burns 50,000t of pulverised coal every day.

The department of public enterprises smoothed the way for the visit to the power station — a national key point — ahead of a briefing on Eskom and the national power system last week. There’s a reason it chose Lethabo: despite being fairly old, and having one unit out of commission after a deadly explosion in October, this is one of Eskom’s better-run plants. It has a dedicated coal supply from the New Vaal Colliery just next door, and a stable operations and maintenance team.

The same cannot be said for many other coal-fired power stations in the Eskom fleet.

Globally, most coal-fired power stations are retired at 30-40 years of age. Of Eskom’s 25strong power-generation fleet (including 15 coal-fired facilities), eight are between 30 and

40 years old, while 10 are older. The oldest, Komati, has been around for 55 years.

Historically, Eskom’s power stations have also been driven very hard, and their performance has inevitably declined. Though major refurbishments are required, these have not been undertaken because of financial constraints.

According to an analysis by the Eskom technical review team — appointed by public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan early last month to probe operational issues — there has been a drastic drop in the fleet’s performance, as measured by the energy availability factor (EAF). In years gone by, the EAF was well above 80%, but at March 31 it was 63% for the year to date. So while SA has 46,000MW of power-generating capacity, less than 29,000MW of that has been available.

Coal supply has also been problematic, and the utility has struggled to shore up stockpiles at many stations.

To add to its woes, routine maintenance at power stations fell short under Eskom’s previous leadership, as budgets were slashed and diverted — something the Hawks, SA’S priority crimes unit, is now investigating.

Eskom’s power stations were quite seriously affected by state capture, Gordhan said at last week’s briefing: capable managers were removed, to the detriment of plant performance.

As it stands, eight power station managers are in an acting position, and four of the eight are acting because the previous managers were suspended.

What’s left behind is a mess. And it hit the SA public hard in mid-march, with the return of scheduled power rationing, or load-shedding. Not only were the cuts the most severe yet — stage 4, for which 4,000MW of demand must be shed — but they lasted for seven consecutive days.

According to Eskom chair Jabu Mabuza, the estimated cost to the economy of loadshedding is a devastating R2bn a day. It’s expected to have a direct effect on SA’S already dismal economic growth numbers.

To make up the shortfall in power supply, and avoid load-shedding, the utility is using its emergency peaking plants, which guzzle diesel at an alarming rate.

Then there are the oversize problem children — Medupi and Kusile. The two megastations were conceived as part of a plan to cope with the sharp rise in power demand and the declining output of the ailing fleet.

Soil was first turned at Medupi, with planned capacity of 1,800MW, in 2007, a year before load-shedding first started. At the time, it was expected to cost R80bn and be completed in financial 2015. Kusile — at the time called “Project Bravo” — was expected to cost the same and be completed the following year.

Fast-forward to 2019, and completion dates for Medupi and Kusile have been pushed back to 2021 and 2022 respectively, while the combined cost has, according to Eskom, breached the R300bn mark.

The excessive capital costs, paired with mushrooming interest on the debt, have financially hamstrung the utility, which is struggling to service a R420bn debt burden.

As revealed by Mabuza last week, Eskom needs R250bn in the form of a cash injection or debt relief if it is to survive.

It’s a seemingly impossible ask, but a