Eskom took 10 years longer than China to build its largest coal power station

Eskom took 16.5 years to build its largest and most advanced power station. This is a decade longer than China took to build a station with the same capacity and similar technologies.

Eskom’s Kusile Power Station outside Emalahleni in Mpumalanga reached full commercial operation in September 2025.

The plant consists of six 800-megawatt (MW) supercritical coal-fired units with a flue-gas desulphurisation (FGD) system to reduce emissions.

Kusile was one of two 4,800MW coal power stations that needed to be built in response to South Africa’s electricity demand beginning to outstrip supply in 2007.

Together with its sibling Medupi near Lephalale in Limpopo, the plant was planned to be fully operational by 2014.

If just one of the two plants had been completed on schedule and operating at capacity, South Africa would have been spared nearly all load shedding in the last decade.

The plant’s construction was delayed by a plethora of problems, including design defects and employee strikes that prevented building at the site.

One of its biggest recent issues was the collapse of a section of an FGD duct in October 2022, caused by the gradual buildup of a cement-like sludge.

A combination of faulty emissions control systems and human errors led to leaking coal ash and hydrated lime spray meeting inside the duct, forming a crust.

The collapse of the FGD forced Eskom to take three units with a combined capacity of 2,400MW offline for roughly a year, contributing to South Africa’s worst year of load-shedding.

As an interim measure, the environment department allowed Eskom to run them with temporary stacks without emissions reduction up to March 2025.

While the reprieve certainly had a major economic upside, the Centre for Research into Energy and Clean Air estimated it caused roughly 680 deaths and 3,000 asthma emergencies.

Kusile in South Africa vs Tuoketuo in China

To illustrate just how poorly Eskom executed the Kusile project, one can compare it to the construction of the Tuoketuo station, which was China’s largest coal power plant until November 2025.

The station’s original capacity was 4,800MW, identical to Kusile’s, and it began construction in March 2000.

The first two 600MW units entered commercial operation in June and July 2003. The next six 600MW units would all come online in pairs each year in 2004, 2005, and 2006.

The station’s initial 4,800MW capacity was therefore up and running within six years and six months, helping support an industrial economic boom in China during the early 2000s.

Subsequent expansion with two more 300MW units for waste coal and two 660MW supercritical units took the station’s capacity to 6,720MW by 2017.

While that makes for a total construction time of 17 years, matching Kusile’s, the total capacity achieved after that time was 40% greater.

In addition, for many of those years, no work was planned or underway on the extra 1,920MW of capacity.

One unit took as long as an entire station in China

Kusile’s first 800MW unit was synchronised to the grid in March 2017, eight years and seven months after construction began.

It took longer for Kusile’s first unit to come online than all eight of Tuoketuo’s units. It took another eight years for the remaining five units to be synchronised and reach commercial operation.

Kusile’s ultimate completion cost of R233 billion was also nearly seven times the estimated R33.56 billion of Tuoketuo.

Tuoketuo’s progress is all the more impressive when considering that the company running the power station, Datang, was established just five years before it began construction.

Eskom was nearly 90 years old by the time construction of Kusile began and had been building large coal-fired power stations for decades.

The facility was the world’s largest coal power plant until November 2025, when it was surpassed by Guodian Beilun Power Station.

The table below provides a comparison of the timelines for the commissioning of the units at Kusile and Tuoketuo.

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