Johannesburg - The Minister of Electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, plans to visit the Grootvlei power station, Eskom’s oldest power station, after a fire broke out on Saturday, resulting in the loss of two units.
Ramokgopa made the announcement yesterday while he was providing the media with a weekly update on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan.
The minister said he would be visiting the station to observe first-hand the extent and degree of the damage and to get an explanation beyond the written explanations and technical reports he was expecting.
The Grootvlei power station, built in 1969, supplies 1 200 megawatts to the national grid.
“I have been advised it’s not a major or catastrophic failure, and the fire was contained and extinguished with minimal essentials damaged. The team anticipates it should not be a long outage, but they are not able to say in absolute terms how long that will take.”
Ramokgopa said although the situation of a fire occurring at a power station was not necessarily abnormal in that it was expected, it was in part for this reason that they had emergency services personnel permanently stationed at power stations to mitigate that risk.
“We should be worried that we have had a fire at one of our power stations. It does not happen regularly, but when it does, it has to worry every one of us.”
Another “thorn in the side” the minister highlighted was the situation at the Koeberg Nuclear power station.
According to the initial plan, the unit taken out at the Koeberg power station was supposed to have been returned this month; however, the minister said the outage slip was over 71 days overdue, which had to worry the country.
Unit 1 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station was switched off on December 10 for planned refuelling and routine maintenance, with the outage at the power station estimated to last approximately six months.
Ramokgopa said he was not convinced that the power utility was on track to return unit 1 at the time they had promised. This presented a real danger of this overlapping with taking out Unit 2.
According to the electricity minister, the power utility having taken out unit one meant that the country lost 920 megawatts from the grid, which meant that if they had to take out unit 2 without the return of unit 1, the country would lose roughly 1840 megawatts in total.
“This is something we are trying to avert, but the reality is that I need to be wiser about our ability to return unit 1 as promised before we can take out unit 2. That is the risk that sits there, and I remain extremely worried about the situation at the Koeberg power station.”
The Star