A WEE DRAM
CHRIS GILMOUR: Worried about the national grid going down? Here’s why we should be okay
‘The lights should stay on, provided no one messes with the coal supplies’
One of my mates — Branko Brkic, of the Daily Maverick — has a recurring nightmare: that the lights in SA will suddenly go off and never come back on again.
He has sweats about the national grid going down, never to recover. And I must confess, whenever there is an unexpected power outage, even when it’s City Power’s fault and not Eskom’s, I too get paranoid.
Attending the postponed March 2017 Eskom results presentation prompted me to revisit our power capacity. Way back, Eskom executives planned well ahead and built new power plants accordingly. That all went awry in the late 1980s and by 2007, there was a 20-year gap in terms of matching supply and demand. Slowly but surely, and way behind schedule, Eskom’s two new coal-fired power stations, Medupi and Kusile, are coming onstream. When both are fully up and running by about 2022, they will add 9,600MW to the national electricity grid. The first unit at Medupi came onstream in August 2015; and the second in April. The four remaining Medupi units should come onstream by May 2020.
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