Eskom’s Ingula Unit 1 synchronised

Eskom has synchronised the last unit at Ingula power station in KwaZulu-Natal, which will "add" 333 megawatts to the national grid.
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This only provides peak power, so it is not always available.

Once completed in the next five years, Eskom’s capacity expansion programme, which is the largest in the company’s history, will increase generation capacity by 1717 384MW, transmission lines by 9 756km and substation capacity by 42 470 megavolt amps.
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That seems a bit much? We currently have about 40GW capacity?
 
furpile said:
This only provides peak power, so it is not always available.


That seems a bit much? We currently have about 40GW capacity?
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Peak only, but peak vs. base is becoming a bit blurred with all the renewable sources. If you consider the situation where all the coal plants, Koeberg and solar and wind farms are running full blast and then you open Ingula, it does add to the total supply.

Seems that the comma took off there.
 
Skerminkel said:
Peak only, but peak vs. base is becoming a bit blurred with all the renewable sources. If you consider the situation where all the coal plants, Koeberg and solar and wind farms are running full blast and then you open Ingula, it does add to the total supply.

Seems that the comma took off there.
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You are right, it does increase the total supply during peak hours. I was just saying it is not a simple case of these 4 units adding the same amount as 2 of Kusile's units to the grid. During low usage hours a lot more energy is needed to pump the water back up to be able to use it for the next peak cycle. So in terms of the load shedding we had these units will not really alleviate the problem. But still, it is a lot cheaper that another 2 Kusile units that will only operate for 4 hours a day or so.
 
Building new plants is a good thing on its own but what about maintenance / replacements of some of the really old power stations and substations that keep giving problems?

The kind of issues that leaves people without electricity for 8-16 hours, 3-4 days a week? It's not ALWAYS cable theft!

It appears Eskom and City Power are careless when it comes to this. I actually moved from the West Rand to the East Rand because Ekurhuleni's electricity supply is up 99% of the time. The electricity at my current residence tripped twice in the last year. When compared to City Power, having outages every other day...I imagine you catch my drift...?
 
It's not ahead of schedule, it's 5 year late. But Eskom can spin anything except their own generators.
 
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