“Multiple crises every day” — Eskom power station boss details chaos
Kobus Steyn, Kendal Power Station General Manager, has detailed the challenges that he encountered when taking on his current job 14 months ago.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Steyn said that when he arrived, “chaos reigned.”
“There were multiple crises every day. And I am not talking about Mickey Mouse crises — serious stuff,” said Steyn.
“We talk about a multiple-unit trip when two or more units trip. In my experience, this is something that will happen maybe once in five years at a power station.”
“In my first four months at Kendal, we had seven incidents of this magnitude. I have never seen something like that in my career,” said Steyn.
Steyn said losing multiple units is problematic, as having three or four units trip simultaneously would take “four or five days” to get them all back on load.
Then, when trying to stabilise these units, Steyn said the power station would encounter other outages.
“We spent most of our time in firefighting mode. You could never go sit and just do planning if emergency situations kept popping up,” he said.
Although Steyn did not know how many of the issues he faced were caused by sabotage, he noted that there had been several suspicious happenings.
“I remember specifically one incident where we had 15 things go wrong that could not have been influenced by each other in any way. These were not caused by any ripple effect,” said Steyn.
“I am talking about separate incidents preventing us from bringing in coal, water and oil. This couldn’t have been coincidental.”
Steyn said things are slowly changing as he searches for stability amid the chaos.
“We are slowly starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Steyn said.
Eskom requests R16 billion
South Africa’s troubled power utility is well aware of the challenges it faces, which is why it has asked the National Treasury to convert R16 billion of bailout funds into equity.
In an investor call on Wednesday, Eskom officials confirmed that the utility had made an application in this regard, and a decision is imminent.
The R16 billion forms a relatively small part of the total R254 billion that the government has given to Eskom to help the power utility sort itself out.
If the application is successful, it will help Eskom lessen its debt-servicing responsibilities.
Load-shedding news
South Africa is currently enjoying an extended period without load-shedding, which began on Thursday, 14 December.
“Due to further improvement in available generating capacity, load-shedding will remain suspended until further notice,” said Eskom in a statement on Thursday.
The power utility had previously scheduled daily breaks from power cuts, followed by stage 2 from 16:00 until 05:00 — a schedule expected to remain in place until today.
Eskom’s data portal shows that electricity demand has gradually declined over the past few weeks, and further reductions are expected later this month.
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