Last month, South Africa’s state-owned electric utility Eskom reported a chimney failure at one of the operational units at the partially completed, six-unit 4.8 GW Kusile coal-fired power plant. Kusile, under construction since 2009, has four 800 MW units in commercial service, according to Wikipedia. Two are still under construction.
The failed flue gas stack at Unit 1 was shared by Units 2 and 3, so they are also out of service, removing some 2,400-MW of production from the South African grid. Eskom says it will be “a few months” until the units are back in service. Kusile, planned since 2007, one of the world’s largest coal-fired generating stations, has turned into a giant headache for Eskom. It illustrates the problems facing Africa’s arguably most developed country.
In addition to the woes at Kusile, at the six-unit, 4,764-MW Medupi plant near the Botswana border, the world’s largest dry-cooled coal plant, the fourth unit is out of service long-term. The 794-MW unit suffered a hydrogen explosion in August 2021. Most recently, Eskom said it could take another two years to repair the unit.
The effects of the unplanned outages, along with scheduled maintenance, mean a constrained holiday season, as was the case last year. Reuters reported last week (Dec. 7), “South African state power utility Eskom on Wednesday ramped up scheduled power cuts to ‘Stage 6’, repeating the worst outage level on record and putting further strain on households and businesses.
“The utility, whose aging fleet of coal-fired power stations is prone to faults, said a flurry of breakdowns and delays returning other units to service had caused the escalation in outages.
“Eskom has struggled to meet electricity demand in Africa’s most industrialised nation for more than a decade.” Stage 6 sheds up to 6,000 MW from the national grid, meaning at least six hours a day without power for most South Africans.
South Africa is the most coal-dependent of the world’s developed nations, and that hasn’t helped reliability. According to USAID, about 80% of the country’s generation comes from coal. Total capacity is 58,095 MW, with coal providing 48,380 MW, hydro 3,495 MW, wind and solar 2,323 MW each, and “other” 580 MW.
Last week, South Africa’s BizNews reprinted an article that first appeared in July of 2021. The new headline on the reprint is “From the archives: Dark history – the real reason behind loadshedding in SA.” The article notes that “South Africa has experienced loadshedding since 2007 because the country failed to build new power stations to keep up with economic growth and replace aging generation plants.”
Between 1961 and 1991, Eskom added 35,804-MW of new generating capacity. Over the next 30 years, Eskom added one new coal-fired baseload plant, the 4,110-MW Majuba station. Majuba has three 665 MW dry-cooled units and three 716 MW wet-cooled units. Construction of the first unit began in 1983 and the final unit went into commercial service in 2001.
Last week (Dec. 8), the Washington Post observed, in a reprinted Bloomberg article, “Even for a nation hit by rolling blackouts since 2008, the power outages that have plagued South Africa over the past year have been difficult to endure. The problem: Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., the state-owned utility that supplies more than 90% of the nation’s electricity, can’t produce enough power from its old and poorly maintained plants to meet demand.”
Kusile and Medupi, which both started construction in 2007, were supposed to remedy the chronic load shedding problem. BizNews commented, “Design faults, corruption, and mismanagement delayed the completion of these important stations.”
The Washington Post (Bloomberg) article also mentioned the corruption problem. Corruption is endemic in many aspects of business and governance in South Africa. A classic example comes from the Kusile project. On Dec. 2, the US Justice Department announced, “ABB Ltd. (ABB), a Swiss-based global technology company listed on the New York Stock Exchange with core businesses focused on electrification, automation, motion, and robotics has agreed to pay more than $315 million to resolve an investigation into violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) stemming from the bribery of a high-ranking official at South Africa’s state-owned energy company.”
According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, “At the heart of the investigation is a corruption-riddled project near Johannesburg at the Kusile power station, a coal-fired plant under Eskom’s construction since 2007. The project was awarded to ABB in 2015.
“According to court documents, between 2014 and 2017, ABB paid bribes to a South African government official who was a high-ranking employee at Eskom through its subsidiaries to gain confidential information and secure multiple contracts.”
–Kennedy Maize