Cape Town - A ballooning maintenance bills exacerbated by protracted delays and the exodus of senior staff have raised questions about Eskom’s ability to extend the lifespan of its Koeberg nuclear plant as the utility battles to end load shedding.
The R20 billion project has been hit by repeated delays.
The power utility confirmed this week that the outage planned for Unit 1 would start “during December” instead of October as initially planned.
The current load shedding was scheduled by Eskom to run for 300 days between April and April 2023.
Eskom is now racing against time as the Koeberg power plant’s licence will expire in 2024.
Eskom has deferred the planned maintenance work on one of the units at Koeberg nuclear power plant to December, raising speculation of prolonged load shedding.
Maintenance work on Unit 1 was scheduled to start in October as part of Eskom's project to prolong the life of the power plant by another 20 years.
Energy experts have warned residents to brace themselves for more blackouts.
Ted Blom said: “I think load shedding will extend for a long time even into the winter of 2024.”
“If the maintenance and refurbishment work on Koeberg is not finished before then this would have serious implications for the national electricity grid,” said Blom.
“Unless everything works according to plan and there's no slippage, Eskom will not be able to finish the work of Koeberg before 2024.”
Blom also warned that if tests had not been carried out before the maintenance work and serious problems were uncovered, this would be a blow to Eskom and the national electricity grid.
“I am not confident that Koeberg would be ready to be fully back online in 2024.
“They already have a track record of anticipating and scheduling things incorrectly.
“Even if they bring in renewable energy by 2024 this cannot be enough as it is not guaranteed 24/7,” said Blom.
Eskom said while the current Unit 2 outage had “progressed safely and the planned work had been completed with the start-up of the unit now in progress, a number of defects emerged”.
The power utility said this directly impacted the outage duration as each defect had to be resolved before the plant could continue and the commissioning/start-up phase was now taking longer than anticipated, and remained susceptible to future defects during start up.
“The unit is currently expected to return to service this (coming) week and will require about 10 days from connection to reach full power,” said Eskom.
The work included maintenance as well as a number of plant refurbishment modifications required for Koeberg’s life extension.
Earlier this year, Eskom chief operations officer Jan Oberholzer said the replacement of three of the steam generators on Unit 2 was meant to start in January until the end of May.
The replacement of the second set of three steam generators on Unit 1 was also expected to run for 155 days, starting in June but has been pushed back by six months.
However Unit 2 has been offline for over six months.
“A big achievement in this outage has been the successful completion of the reactor pressure vessel cover replacement, a prerequisite for Koeberg’s life extension,” said the power utility.
The steam generator replacement project is part of Eskom’s plans to extend the life of Koeberg by another 20 years when the plant is expected to reach the end of its life by 2024/25.
Eskom and the main contractor at Koeberg, French company Framatome, performed a final review of the steam generator replacement programme to meet quality levels and outage schedule.
The review indicated that Unit 2 would not return to the grid in June as scheduled, as facilities required to support the replacement programme were not ready.
Energy expert and physicist at the University of Johannesburg, Professor Hartmut Winkler said each of the two units at Koeberg had an output of 900 megawatts (MW) and each load shedding stage corresponded to 1000MW.
“When one unit of Koeberg is down and demand is bigger than supply, then the loads shedding will be one stage higher than it would otherwise be,” Winkler explained.
Koeberg Alert Alliance spokesperson Peter Becker said the “bungling” at nuclear plant had cost the country massively, including penalties.
“Electricity consumers and taxpayers will now have to pay for this,” said Becker.
He called on Eskom to “leave the Koeberg plant running,” and focus on creating renewable energy now and shut down the plant in 2024.
He also raised concerns over the “exodus” of experienced and skilled staff required to run the plant.
“I know specifically of a plant in the United Arab Emirates where former Koeberg staff are now working.
“The chief nuclear officer has also resigned to emigrate to Canada and the Koeberg plant manager will also be leaving soon,” he said.
Eskom confirmed the resignation of Riedewaan Bakardien, the chief nuclear officer, who leaves on July 31.
A nuclear executive Keith Featherstone, with over 30 years of nuclear experience, as well as a previous Koeberg power station manager, will be acting in the CNO role.
Eskom said plant manager Nomawethu Mtwebana was selected by the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) in Atlanta in the US to join as a reverse loanee for the next year.
The power utility also defended its proposal to introduce a tariff charge of R938 for solar panels and a 32.7% electricity increase in 2023.
“The unbundling process that Eskom is going through requires it to update its tariffs to reflect the different services being provided, to avoid cross subsidies,” said Eskom.
The company also said the intent of the fixed cost for an Eskom connection was not to disincentive the use of solar power.
“Eskom is intending to also introduce a time-of-use residential tariffs, which if used together with PV and batteries will enable customers to significantly save.
“If approved by the regulator, the tariff will also provide the option for Eskom to compensate customers that export onto the grid, in other words Eskom would be able to credit such customers for electricity fed into the grid,” the company said.
Winkler said the tariff measures would achieve the exact opposite of where the country should be going, as they would punish and disincentive households and other entities that were trying to save on using electricity from the grid.
He said such a measure would instead reward those who “are wasteful in their electricity use” and might in certain instances even end up having to pay less than they are now.
Weekend Argus