Scramble+to+avert+national+power+collapse,+Sunday+Times



=Scramble to avert national power collapse=


 * //Eskom goes into panic mode as South Africa runs out of electricity with winter only months away//**

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 26 February 2006

 * ROWAN PHILP and JOCELYN MAKER**

SOUTH Africa is scrambling to head off a massive electricity crisis before winter.

The Sunday Times has established that Eskom has embarked on what it yesterday called “a historic mobilisation” of staff and government support to solve a problem that threatens to cost the economy up to R2-billion by July.

However, experts and Eskom officials said this week that even greater national crises lay ahead because poor planning — and a failure to anticipate the country’s 5%-plus growth rate — had forced the country’s ageing electricity grid to run permanently at full throttle just to supply basic needs.

They said it meant that a single mishap at any power station could plunge whole regions of the country into cold and darkness over the next year.

The Sunday Times has established that, last week, one sixth of Eskom’s claimed national power capacity was off-line, causing strain on the grid that contributed to mass blackouts and an emergency at Koeberg nuclear power station.

Although the grid is to be expanded between 2007 and 2011, Eskom has now been forced into regularly stripping electricity supply from big companies, including the mining giant BHP Billiton, to cope with demand from other customers.

Koeberg, the only major power station not on the Highveld, saw the second of its two nuclear reactor units crash last Saturday in a failure that sparked a state of emergency at the plant and left the station crippled for five days.

Because only limited power can travel down transmission lines from the coal power stations of the Highveld, this led to blackouts across the Western Cape that caused more than R500-million in economic losses.

Koeberg’s Unit 1 has been shut down since Christmas day, when a loose bolt damaged a key piece of equipment in the unit’s generator, the 200-ton “rotor”. It may not be repaired until June.

Although Unit 2 has been brought back on line, it will run out of its uranium fuel at the end of April and must shut down for 30 to 60 days for refuelling and maintenance before then. Eskom warned earlier this week that consumers should brace themselves for the shutdown from March 9.

However, this week, Marc Moreau, director of Sacob Western Cape, said more than a month of blackouts resulting from both Koeberg units being down would cost the economy “over R1-billion”.

Eskom has hatched a desperate plan that could avoid having both units down for a single day — but might prove to be a gamble that cripples the Western Cape in winter.

This week, Dr Steve Lennon, Eskom’s managing director for resources and strategy, revealed that “one scenario” was for Unit 2 to operate until it ran out of fuel at the end of April in the hope that a rotor could be brought from Europe in time to get Unit 1 going. He confirmed that a rotor had been sourced in Europe this week.

“But there are further challenges,” he said. “There’s still logistics around getting it here. So we’re still doing this in parallel: repairing our own [rotor]; sourcing the other one.”

Smunda Mokoena, chief executive of the National Energy Regulator of South Africa, said the organisation had launched an investigation this week to establish if any regulations had been violated. Lennon said Eskom had a total national capacity of 37000 megawatts, with just 10% of it offline for scheduled summer maintenance at various units.

Peak demand this winter, he said, was expected to be 35000mW, and up to 36000mW if it was particularly cold. But Eskom logs from last weekend show that its total available power was just 31000mW.

One well-placed source within Eskom confirmed that “they have postponed the [Koeberg] refuel for as long as they can; that’s the decision”.

He said: “If that rotor is not replaced by May, the Western Cape will have rolling black-outs for two months, when it’s getting cold — and I can’t see how they can possibly get it up and running in time. “This is a nightmare beyond comprehension: people out there don’t understand how [Eskom management] are trying to wangle to get out of this one.”

Lennon admitted that Eskom planning for the grid had not anticipated an economic growth rate of 5.1% last year: “Now all of a sudden you’ve got to rush these [dormant power plants] back in [to operation].”

He went on: “I don’t want to kid you: the system is very tight, and our power stations are middle-aged. And if something goes wrong with one of them, as we had with Koeberg Unit 1, then it does stress the whole system.”

Meanwhile, amid claims from customers, including municipalities, that Eskom was hiding vital information, the Sunday Times has established that:


 * VIP Protection Unit personnel have been called to Koeberg since December as part of an increased security alert;
 * Four of Koeberg’s most experienced executives, including its power station manager, plant manager and safety director, have left to take jobs overseas since 2003;
 * The entire batch of uranium fuel rods for Koeberg’s sole functioning nuclear reactor was found to be faulty, and recalled to France, in the past three months; and
 * In the past year, Eskom has been increasingly saving power of up to 1000mW by cutting off key customers, invoking an old agreement that certain heavy industries be the first to be switched off in a time of power shortage in exchange for cheaper electricity tariffs.


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=ST6A169416 **

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