Eskom has made a critical decision to delay the start of the outage of unit 1 of the Koeberg Nuclear power station to Saturday, in a bid to avert an additional stage of load shedding that could spell total collapse of the electricity grid, and a national blackout.
The struggling power utility yesterday said delaying the outage at Koeberg would allow time to stabilise the system, and the recovery of some generation capacity.
Koeberg’s unit was scheduled to be shut down for usual maintenance and refuelling, and the replacement of the three steam generators yesterday, as part of the long-term operation to extend the operating life of Africa’s only nuclear power station by a further 20 years.
The unit is anticipated to return to service during June, 2023 and its outage will remove 920MW of generation capacity from the national grid during this time.
Eskom currently has 4 984MW on planned maintenance, while another 19 052MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns, meaning that nearly half of the 45 000MW installed capacity of the country’s electricity grid is offline.
Eskom’s acting chief nuclear officer, Sadika Touffie, said the refuelling and maintenance outage would now commence on Saturday should the grid conditions have recovered enough to ensure stability of the system.
“While Eskom is ready to commence with the outage, with the contractors and all the requisite resources on standby, grid stability is an important consideration prior to shutting down the unit 1 reactor to commence the maintenance and refuelling outage,” Touffie said.
“This is going to be a long, but necessary outage – the first of its kind for Koeberg. Eskom has taken care to ensure no undue delays are experienced once the project gets under way.”
Eskom implemented Stage 6 load shedding for the fourth time this year from Wednesday until 5am today, and reduced it to Stage 5 to 5am on Saturday.
There has been fear that the depletion of the budget to acquire diesel for the open- -cycle gas turbines will lead to Eskom implementing an unprecedented Stage 7 or Stage 8 load shedding.
The rolling power cuts have had a crippling effect on the country’s productivity, with manufacturing output growing below forecast in October, dragged by load shedding.
According to Statistics South Africa yesterday, manufacturing production rose by 1% year on year in October, following a 2.9% rise in the prior month and missing market estimates of a 4.5% advance.
This was the fourth consecutive month of growth in factory activity but the weakest in four months, in the face of intense rolling blackouts.
Nedbank senior economist Nicky Weimar said manufacturing production was expected to increase moderately in the final months of the year, but the outlook for next year was less rosy.
“Local operating conditions will remain challenging, characterised by persistent inefficiencies at the country’s ports and continued power outages. Within this context, we expect manufacturing production to decline in 2023,” Weimar said.
Meanwhile, Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe yesterday announced that an additional 13 solar projects under the 5th Bid Window and five solar projects under the 6th of the Renewable Energy IPP Procurement Programme (REIPPPP Bid) have signed legal agreements, paving the way for additional new generation capacity to come on-line from early 2025.
With the signing of these 13 agreements, the department has now concluded 19 out of the 25 announced projects under Bid Window 5,which will add an overall 1 759MW renewable capacity to the national grid.
The five bidders under the 6th Bid Window will add a total of 860MW and an eligible 6th bidder has also been identified in order to fill the remaining gap up to 1 000MW.
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