The Drakensberg Pumped Storage Scheme can ramp up from standstill to producing enough electricity to offset one load-shedding stage in 3 minutes

[mylesillidge]

45-year-old mountain tunnel helps to keep load-shedding at bay in South Africa

Located between the Driekloof Dam in the Free State and the Kilburn Dam in KwaZulu-Natal, the Drakensberg Pumped Storage Scheme is a peaking hydro-electric plant with 1GW of capacity.

This capacity is enough to offset roughly one stage of load-shedding, and the dam is a crucial tool in Eskom's arsenal to mitigate rotational power cuts.

 

[HAL 9000]

Meanwhile, this petrol-electric 'plant' with 5kW of capacity can ramp up from standstill to producing enough electricity to offset ANY load-shedding stage in under 10 seconds... and is a crucial tool in Eskom's arsenal to mitigate rotational power cuts.

 

[wingnut771]

They not even using it:

 

[Skerminkel]

Interesting and important story.
One sentence should have stated that the Drakensberg is one of three in the country.

 

[Skerminkel]

They not even using it:
...

Please explain how to read the graph. To me it seems the plant is running between 80 and 100 unit hours, whatever that may mean.

 

[wingnut771]

Please explain how to read the graph. To me it seems the plant is running between 80 and 100 unit hours, whatever that may mean.

Yes, as you can see they are using the other 2 much more and hardly using the 3rd. There is 2600MW of pumped storage, I only see them using 1700MW if you look at the generation graph when they pump back overnight:

Station build-up for the last 7 days - Eskom Data Portal

This shows how resources were used to build-up the demand over the past 7 days, and it includes both generation and demand side resources that Eskom has contracts with.

www.eskom.co.za

Eskom cant even post 7 days of generation these days.

 

[garyc]

This was done during the time of some epic water schemes in the country. My favorite was what happened during the drought of 1983. The Vaal dam had dropped to 10% capacity and the river had stopped flowing to the power stations like Tutuka, meaning that they may have to shut them down. A series of temporary weirs were built across the river together with large pumping stations, which allowed for the direction of the Vaal to be reversed. This allowed the water released from the Drakensberg pumped storage scheme to flow uphill to the Grootdraai dam and to keep the lights on. It also allowed Secunda to keep going (since there was a fuel crunch at the time), and also kept the mines going (which were the core of the economy back then). The entire emergency project took 20 weeks, including Eskom constructing new high-voltage power lines for the pump stations.

 

[wingnut771]

This was done during the time of some epic water schemes in the country. My favorite was what happened during the drought of 1983. The Vaal dam had dropped to 10% capacity and the river had stopped flowing to the power stations like Tutuka, meaning that they may have to shut them down. A series of temporary weirs were built across the river together with large pumping stations, which allowed for the direction of the Vaal to be reversed. This allowed the water released from the Drakensberg pumped storage scheme to flow uphill to the Grootdraai dam and to keep the lights on. It also allowed Secunda to keep going (since there was a fuel crunch at the time), and also kept the mines going (which were the core of the economy back then). The entire emergency project took 20 weeks, including Eskom constructing new high-voltage power lines for the pump stations.

This government of today can’t even build transmission lines and have to outsource.