Eskom’s big coal station shutdown mistake

Over two years after shutting down its Komati coal power station in Mpumalanga to convert it into a renewable power facility, Eskom has not yet appointed the companies that will be building the plant’s new generators.

Komati was supposed to be the first testing ground for Eskom’s Just Energy Transition (JET) project, which is aimed at reducing the utility’s reliance on fossil fuels like coal power in favour of renewable energy.

A key part of the project’s goals is to ensure that this switch does not leave workers and communities behind that rely on Eskom’s extensive coal power station fleet for their livelihoods.

When Eskom originally announced the shutdown of Komati’s last unit in October 2022, it said the site would be getting 150MW of solar, 70MW of wind, and 150MW battery storage.

As of November 2024, not a single megawatt of that capacity has entered construction.

However, Eskom’s failure to plan and execute properly on the Komati project threatens its ability to get buy-in from coal-reliant communities on the shift towards clean energy at its other to-be-decommissioned power stations over the next few decades.

It has also enabled staunch fossil fuel supporters like mineral resources minister Gwede Mantashe to use Komati as a warning sign against the transition.

“I am one of the people who always said the Komati decommissioning was a disaster. It does not pass the ‘just’ part of the energy transition,” he said.

Eskom’s JETP general manager Vikesh Rajpaul maintained that Komati was not shut down from a “climate perspective” but had reached the end of its economic life.

“It became too expensive at that time for us to keep operating it, and that is why it was shut down,” he said.

However, in July 2024, Eskom CEO Dan Maroke also conceded the Komati conversion project had not gone according to plan and greed with Mantashe regarding the impact on the community.

He likened the shutdown to dropping an “atomic bomb” on people who relied on the plant for their livelihoods.

The shutdown had a minimal impact on Eskom’s overall generating capacity, as the single remaining unit contributed just 150MW to the grid.

However, the Komati community has suffered severe socio-economic damage due to a lack of activity at the station.

According to former Mpumalanga Premier Refilwe Mtshweni, the number of people working at Komati had declined from about 1,700 to 174 by June 2023.

However, Eskom claimed that the number had only reduced from 189 to 150 permanent employees and 364 to 240 maintenance and service contractors.

The power utility maintained that the 39 permanent employees who were no longer at Komati moved to work at other stations.

According to Komati acting general manager Thevan Pillay, the station was supporting 3,000 to 4,000 people with jobs or contract work when it was operating.

Regardless of the actual number of impacted jobs, it is not disputed that the greater Komati community has been rocked by the shutdown.

In February 2024, Pillay told Mail & Guardian that the “just transition” was a bit of a sore point for Komati’s “coal men.”

The World Bank, which has provided $492 million (R8.6 billion) for the project, estimated the Komati conversion should take about four to five years, including planning.

However, Pillay has estimated the conversion will take eight years due to unforeseen challenges.

When Eskom switched off the last unit at Komati in October 2022, it had not yet secured full approval to use funding from the World Bank to build the plant.

It had also not yet launched an environmental impact study to ascertain the influence that a renewable power facility — in particular wind turbines — would have on biodiversity at or near the site.

The delayed environmental impact assessment found that the plant would harm the local bat population, wetlands, and critical biodiversity.

Pillay did not explain exactly how the renewables would cause harm, but University of Cape Town researchers have found that a single wind turbine kills about 4.6 birds in a year.

Eskom only issued tenders for the first two renewable facilities at Komati in August 2024.

The first tender calls for companies that can build, operate, and maintain a 30MWp solar power plant at the Komati site for three years.

The second requires installing, operating, and maintaining a battery system with 600MWh storage and an output of 150MWp.

It is unclear what happened to the remaining 120MW of solar power and 70MW of wind power that were originally planned for the site.

Lessons already learnt — Eskom

MyBroadband asked Eskom for feedback on the conversion process, but it had not provided a comment by the time of publication.

Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokwena previously said that the lessons learnt at Komati would inform planning for transitioning other coal power stations, like Lethabo in the Free State.

In that regard, Eskom seems to have made much better progress.

The National Energy Regulator of South Africa recently announced it had approved a generating licence for a 75MW solar power facility at the Lethabo Power Station.

Eskom issued a tender for the facility in April 2024 with a deadline of 4 June 2024 for submissions.

According to Eskom’s latest decommissioning timeline, Lethabo Power Station is only set to be shut down in 2036.

That means that the first renewable capacity at that power station is likely to come online long before Eskom decommissions the plant.