FEAR OF THE DARK
When Eskom puts your life on the line
WHEN your life depends on an oxygen machine that runs off electricity, few things are as frightening as a power blackout.
Joe Harwood, 69, a subcontractor who spent years working underground in platinum, gold and coal mines, has only about 10% of his lung capacity, making it impossible to breathe on his own.
“I’m on oxygen 24 hours a day. I sleep with it. I live on it. If I take it off, I go into a panic situation,” he said at his home in Croydon, Kempton Park.
On Thursday at 8am a 3 000MW shortage of power forced a series of blackouts to save the national grid.
At a media briefing at Megawatt Park on Friday, Brian Dames, the outgoing CEO of the power utility, explained how a shift change at a BHP Billiton colliery resulted in wet coal being loaded onto conveyor belts heading to the boilers at Kendal power station in Mpumalanga.
The coal was essentially slurry — a wet mass of fine coal with no solid form — that slipped off the conveyors and caused four units at the station to go offline.
But the bad news is that energy supply is likely to get worse before it improves.
Power supply typically comes under more pressure during winter, and the closure of one of Koeberg’s nuclear reactors in two weeks’ time will prove to be a major test for Eskom’s power juggling act.
According to Dames, wet coal was not the only reason for this week’s problems.
Other unrelated factors included an interruption at the Majuba power station in Mpumalanga.
By 5am on Thursday, the system as a whole had lost 3 320MW, and although it was a “a very painful decision”, according to Dames, rotational blackouts became unavoidable.
“It comes back to the fact that we don’t have enough capacity to meet the demand,” said Eskom spokesman Tony Stott.
The system has been strangled for years, but since the devastating blackouts in 2008, which cost the country in the region of R50-billion, less than 4000MW has been added to South Africa’s stuttering grid.
Heavy industry has borne the
I was scared to have a shower in case, while I was in there, the mains went off
brunt of keeping the lights and the geysers on in residential homes, but this week, even with the added capacity of the open-cycle gas turbines and 2 000MW from BHP Billiton’s aluminium smelters, the system was heading for the wall.
Eskom took the decision to start blackouts across non-industrial parts of South Africa and, for between two and six hours, homes were plunged into darkness, aircraft were grounded and trains stalled.
Ironically, the widespread strikes in the platinum industry freed up a critical 400MW.
The government stands accused of failing to implement an emergency energy security plan devised three years ago by key energy stakeholders, including the country’s 100 biggest com- panies, which would have helped to avoid blackouts.
It approved only 1 400MW of the more than 6 000MW power independently produced and offered last year.
This new independently produced electricity would have been available to feed into the national grid by 2016, before the completion of Eskom’s two new coal-fired power stations.
Instead, Eskom is spending staggering sums of money on diesel to generate emergency power to keep the lights on.
Just one of its four emergency peaking stations — at Atlantis on the Cape West Coast — is burning 40 000 litres of diesel an hour per generating unit, said Eskom parliamentary affairs manager Carin de Villiers. The plant has nine generating units. Based on the going market price of diesel, it could cost up to R4.7-million an hour on fuel alone to run the entire plant.
Dames said: “The risk of emergency conditions developing remains with us for the rest of March and into April. From a planning perspective, the unplanned outages are expected to reduce as we go into winter.”
Harwood, who told Talk Radio 702 of his plight, is fearful after the power cuts.
“I was scared to have a shower this afternoon in case, while I was in there, the mains went off. I go into the shower with the oxygen on me on a long extension tube,” he said on Friday.