Just how bad are things at Eskom?

On eNCA this morning, the Eskom spokesperson was saying that they realise that they have to do maintenance on power stations and equipment but they can't. If they do the maintenance, we go into load shedding like we had in 2008. We have to wait for new power stations to be built before they can service the other generators etc.
 
Bighit said:
On eNCA this morning, the Eskom spokesperson was saying that they realise that they have to do maintenance on power stations and equipment but they can't. If they do the maintenance, we go into load shedding like we had in 2008. We have to wait for new power stations to be built before they can service the other generators etc.
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That's till June if Medupi timeline is to be believed...
 
Bighit said:
On eNCA this morning, the Eskom spokesperson was saying that they realise that they have to do maintenance on power stations and equipment but they can't. If they do the maintenance, we go into load shedding like we had in 2008. We have to wait for new power stations to be built before they can service the other generators etc.
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What the **** are we in now? Unplanned outages?
 
cybershark said:
That's till June if Medupi timeline is to be believed...
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Even if Medupi comes online, it will only add 800mw to the grid (theoretical maximum). If you look at the average shortfall we have on an almost daily basis of 2000mw, alot wont change. At best we will have more stage 1 shedding than stage 2.

With all the critical urgent maintenance required on the older stations, all that may happen is they may put down one or two units elsewhere to conduct maintenance, while medupi replaces that specific load, leading to a very similar amount of supply as we have now.

Only when we have around 2-3 units running from medupi and kusile, adding around 2400mw, may we see a relief in the loadshedding. This will be in 5 years time.
 
^ Exactly. Medupi will not save us like the Government overlords want us to believe. It is a false achievement and nothing worth celebrating.

I think we all need to accept that we need to loadshed more to do critical maintenance. Otherwise more and more generators will trip, fail or blow up and each one we lose means even more serious pain for the next 3 years.
 
ESCUM just want more money.
Same tactics as in 2008.
Then off to NERSA with a big feeding trough to beg for more MONEY.
 
Brian Dames, who – let’s not forget – kept the lights on for his entire tenure as chief executive of Eskom must be relieved he’s no longer in charge.
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That is a large part of our current problem. When the 2008 crisis hit, Eskom's policy was to keep the lights on at all cost. Which they succeeded in, but now the cost of doing so becomes apparent. And it might be a lot more than we would want to pay.

Seeing as the generation shortfall is a long term problem, arguably a better course of action would have been to keep on load shedding from 2008. Doing so would have given time to do maintenance on existing infrastructure (which is now falling apart) and not run peak generation capacity excessively (which adds massive costs and is also part of the reason they need higher tariff increases).

From one of these articles they said the Open Cycle Gas Turbines were supposed to run about 3 hours a day. That is only during peak time, and then it is a lot cheaper than building base load capacity that will not be used for most of the day. But now to make up for lost base load capacity, these turbines are running up to 17 hours a day, along with the associated high fuel bills, logistic problems getting all the fuel to the turbines etc. The running cost is also multiple times higher than a coal power plant, so Eskom's cost go up and they need higher tariffs to compensate. It is really a vicious cycle.
 
I walked in a shopping mall to get takeaway, but bcos of the outage many of the food shops were doing nothing.....business lost at lunch time.
 
This happened faster than I thot, I mean they should have learnt from Zim
 
I would say, do load 3 shedding for a week at most, and service the damn stations that needs servicing - eg get all your engineers and fix the issue at hand??

yes it will be hard , but surely it safe money in the long run - No longer diesel shortages etc
 
Brian Dames, who – let’s not forget – kept the lights on for his entire tenure as chief executive of Eskom
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Thats not saying much though. Sure he kept the lights on...but was that achieved by cutting maintenance?
 
HavocXphere said:
Thats not saying much though. Sure he kept the lights on...but was that achieved by cutting maintenance?
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As much as I'd love to blame Brian, he's probably the only one that sat on the board who knows the company. He started out 30yrs ago as an Engineer in Training and made his way through the ranks to the top. Unfortunately his hands appear to be tied much like voting in parliament gets done by the majority of cadres to strongarm any decision through.

Exactly how much can you do to Medupi when cosatu's cronies causes unfathomably long and ridiculous strikes...and when the ANC's majority owned Hitatchi screw up the boiler welding job.

But yeah, he still accepted a R22m salary...that puts you in the hot seat.
 
Based on this a genny seems to be a really good idea, does anyone here know where to get stats on the output vs fuel consumption of the typical generators available in SA? Its all good getting the VA peak and average rating, but I never see a fuel consumption figure.
 
Has anyone actually thought about the strain this is putting on Koeberg? No maintenance, overloading etc.... What if it goes boom?
 
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