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Cape Town – If Medupi and Kusile power stations had become fully operational when they were supposed to, South Africa would not be on the brink of an energy crisis and Majuba's silo collapse would not have impacted the electricity’s grid.
Energy expert Chris Yelland said if these two power stations, with 4800MW each, were operating now, Eskom would have had an extra 9600MW of generating capacity on the grid.
“The cause of the tight Eskom system is fundamentally the lateness of Medupi and Kusile power stations coming on stream,” said Yelland, the MD of EE Publishers.
“The reality is, they are four years late.”
By October 2013, Eskom should have had the entire Medupi Power Station generating into the grid, but now the first unit will only go live in the middle of 2015. “Things are running seriously late,” he said.
Maintenance concern
“Eskom has been forced to reduce its normal maintenance regime because it simply does not have the spare capacity sufficient to allow it to do proper maintenance,” said Yelland.
“This comes at a time when the system is already constrained and, as a result, Medupi and Kusile being late is the final straw that breaks the camel’s back and pushes the country into load shedding.”
Listen to the full interview with Yelland and Fin24's Matthew le Cordeur.
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Yelland said Eskom’s marketing plan was centred on encouraging people “not to use its product”.
“In fact, the campaign is working because electricity consumption in South Africa at the moment is at a seven-year low,” he said. “It’s never been this low before.”
Last week Eskom appealed to industry, municipalities and consumers to reduce their consumption due to the pressure on the system, failing which rolling blackouts would occur.
Even though the demand for electricity is reducing due to this call, Yelland said it is also reducing because it is “simply not available”.
Electricity the engine for economic growth
“Productive industry and the mining industry are starved of electricity for its production purposes,” he said. “Unfortunately, Eskom’s current generation fleets are declining even faster than the decline in electricity demand. We’re in trouble.
“It’s hurting the economy, it’s constraining growth, and one of the reasons why the Treasury has reduced its growth forecasts down from 4% to 1.5% is because of a lack of electricity that is the engine for economic growth,” he said.
“This solution to the problem is more generation capacity to feed a growing economy,” said Yelland. “That is what we need, that’s what we don’t have.”
Electricity price will go up
“We need to get Medupi and Kusile online as fast as possible, but Medupi is only going to be generating at full capacity at the end of 2018 and Kusile Power Station one year later,” he said.
“In the interim, it’s a question of tightening belts, reducing electricity demand still further, [and] heading Eskom’s call to use less of its product,” he said.
“Unfortunately that has its own consequences just for the price of electricity, because the less electricity we use in South Africa, the higher the price of electricity has to be in order to pay for the fixed overheads and the infrastructure.
“So it’s really a negative, downward cycle, which we need to break and one can only do this actually by improving the current generation performance in terms of its reliability and in terms of improving the energy availability factor, which would ensure we don’t have the unplanned outages of this nature,” he said.
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