Inaccuracies in Treasury-commissioned power station report, says Eskom

One of the most worrying findings in a report on Eskom’s coal-fired power stations commissioned by the National Treasury appears to be inaccurate.

Eric Shunmagum, Eskom senior manager in the group executive generation office, said the state-owned power utility could not agree with the report which states that urgent maintenance to the raw water treatment plant shared by Medupi and Matimba power stations was needed to prevent “catastrophic failure”.

The report, prepared by the German vgbe consortium said if the plant fails, 12 generation units with a combined capacity of 9,800MW would go off grid.

But according to Shunmagum, who addressed the media on Monday alongside electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, the two power stations do not share a water treatment plant.

“We have had various engagements with Treasury and vgbe [to discuss the report]. While we embrace [the suggestions it makes] there are some inaccuracies in the report which have been reported to Treasury and vgbe,” he said.

Not only did Medupi and Matimba not share a water treatment plant but he was also not aware of any urgent outstanding maintenance work needed for their water treatment plants that placed the power stations at risk of shutdown, Shunmagum said.

The vgbe report also said the water treatment plant at Kendal power station was in very poor condition and needed urgent maintenance and refurbishment. Shunmagum said they were aware of challenges with water treatment at Kendal and that these were being addressed.

He would not elaborate on what other inaccuracies Eskom found in the vgbe report but said Eskom was putting together a detailed response to “communicate some of the issues”.

“[Eskom] will put together a holistic response to highlight issues [in the vgbe report]. Some of the content needs to be corrected.”

Ramokgopa also responded to the vgbe report, saying they would consider the report alongside similar reports done since 2019 by the department of public enterprises, the World Bank, and a report commissioned by Eskom.

There were “cross-cutting issues” in these reports, such as process management, the “management infrastructure” at Eskom, and the “mindset, behaviour and capabilities” of Eskom employees.

Some work was already under way in response to issues raised in the reports and now that there was “greater levels of stability at Eskom” following the appointment of Dan Marokane as CEO, Eskom would move forward with a consolidation of these reports and working on structured way to respond to the findings, Ramokgopa said.

Eskom was already, he said, increasing maintenance that resulted in more load-shedding .

The vgbe report suggested to prevent the “collapse” of some plants Eskom be allowed to do proper maintenance work “even if this means a higher level of load-shedding for a limited period of time.”

The priority of the Eskom coal fleet, the report says, “has been to quickly fix the actual bottlenecks in generation capacities rather than to restore the plants to ‘as new conditions’ after an outage”.

“The plants have been forced to continue operating at the expense of their technical condition. The consequences are reflected in the high number of incidents, trips and partial load losses.

“This cycle has now gained so much momentum that it could lead to the collapse of plants or further capacity losses.”

Ramokgopa said Eskom increased planned maintenance to between 7,000MW and 8,000MW (each load-shedding stage is equal to about 1,000MW of unserved energy) in December, January and February. This was about 1,000MW to 2,000MW more than it usually took offline for maintenance during the summer months.

If planned maintenance was reduced by 25%-50% from September to February, load-shedding could have been almost completely averted during these months.

However, this would have left the generation system vulnerable and weaker during the high-demand winter months.

Eskom usually has about 3,500MW of generation capacity offline for planned maintenance during the winter. The system outlook for this winter, which will indicate how much load-shedding South Africans should prepare for during the colder months, will be shared in April, Eskom said.

erasmusd@businesslive.co.za