Breather for SA electricity consumers

Cape Town - There will not be power cuts as a result of the Majuba power station crisis anywhere in the country on Monday, Eskom said.

"There will be no load shedding today [Monday]. We managed to restore coal supplies to two of the six units at the [Majuba] power station. This means that one third of the power station's normal capacity is back in service," said spokesperson Andrew Etzinger.

"As a result Eskom is not needing to implement load shedding during the day. However, the power system remains under pressure and consumers are urged to use electricity sparingly for the remainder of the week."

A coal storage silo at the Majuba power station in Mpumalanga cracked on Saturday and later collapsed. Etzinger said as a result coal conveyor systems were damaged.

On Sunday, alternative measures were put in place to deliver the coal needed.

"For units one and two, we had to bring in coal through an alternative delivery mechanism involving the trucking of coal," he said.

"Then the coals were placed on mobile conveyors using front-end loaders, and the current rate 1 200 tonnes of coal per hour were being brought in."

Eskom was working on a similar solution for delivering coal to units five and six.

He said units three and four were not affected.

The operation involved excess manpower and cost but Etzinger could not immediately provide figures.

"This is a direct result of Eskom's deficient maintenance and planning and the public enterprise ministry's lack of quality control measures over Eskom," DA MP Natasha Michael said in a statement.

Michael intended writing to Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown to ask for a detailed timeline for maintenance on all the country's power stations, to avoid such failures.

The countrywide blackouts should have been a last resort.

She called on Brown to give a full briefing on Eskom's current capacity constraints to parliament.

Solidarity said Eskom had been warned about skills shortages and an exodus of experts from the company for years.

"Those warnings fell on deaf ears," the trade union's energy industry head Deon Reyneke said in a statement.

"The time has arrived for Eskom to answer for its reluctance to address these issues."

Solidarity would ask Eskom to conduct a survey of its skills pool to address the shortcomings.

At least four cities across the country had to contend with power cuts on Sunday and Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth have been warned of rolling blackouts after Eskom lost 1 800 MW when the silo cracked and collapsed.

The outages could last the rest of the week, Eskom warned.

"Could see all their lights burning. Is it because all the MPs live there?"

User Nikita Nankoo said: "This load shedding is ridiculous! Some of us are in the middle of writing university exams and now studying at night becomes a problem. It's rather unfair especially since we pay such high costs for the electricity."

The new stations have already been paid for and a cracking of that magniture beforehand clearly show people aren't doing their jobs, said Nankoo.

Gustav Erlank said it is disturbing that the system has so little redundancy - a fact he feels almost defies gravity itself. "This is totally ridiculous - how can the whole country be affected by one silo that collapses? Is this how feeble the system has become?"

The overall cost to the economy must be enormous, said Erlank. "The public should probably take note that its future is in the hands of either a very incompetent or callous leadership."

A user who did not provide his name said succintly: "If the maintenance crews did their jobs properly, this may not have happened." 

Robert Burger echoed this sentiment: "Sorry to say this is lack of maintenance."

Leon Liebenberg said: "This is rubbish. It is not loading sheddings but power failure or power cuts due to lack of or no maintenance." Johan Viljoen added: "Poor and no maintenance."

However, some looked on the bright side. Maud said in her two years of living in Cape Town, she had never experienced a blackout. This did not affect her and her family badly: "First this allowed us to explain one more time to our children that energy is to be spared whenever possible, that our consumption is always increasing due to our way of life and that we must be very careful with it."

And as an added bonus, the family looked at the stars and "I must say: Cape Town in the dark... How romantic!"

 - Fin24

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