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- World-leading energy experts have delivered a stark ultimatum to the government – accept a higher load shedding risk to fix power stations "immediately".
- A 600-page report commissioned by National Treasury examined critical reasons for poor power station performance.
- The report is an independent and highly technical view of the issues that plague the country's power stations.
A group of international experts have recommended to the government that power stations be shut down and fixed properly "immediately" – even if that means higher levels of load shedding.
A failure to break the negative cycle Eskom's power stations have been trapped in, the experts warned, could cause power plants to collapse further and much worse generation capacity losses.
The group of leading experts spent five months in the country visiting each power station and meeting with Eskom officials.
The delegation, called the VGBE Consortium, was made up of experts from companies including Dornier, KWS, RWE and Steag – each company boasting formidable experience in power generation. They have named the document the OPERA Report.
VGBE Energy E is the international technical association of energy plant operators that has 437 members in 32 countries, 90% in Europe.
"National Treasury commissioned the independent assessment of all Eskom coal-fired power stations to obtain an in-depth understanding of their operational challenges. It is hoped that the findings and recommendations will assist in strengthening Eskom's corporate plan and continue to support the turnaround at Eskom," a media statement accompanying the report reads.
It was handed over to Treasury and the finance minister in September 2023.
The report is an independent and highly technical view of the issues that plague the country's power stations.
Among the most important is a fixation on one metric – Energy Availability Factor (EAF) – a "dead end" that "leads to poorer plant performance".
"Outage and maintenance activities have been deferred over the last months and years to lift – or at least to maintain – the EAF," the report reads.
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EAF is a metric that focuses, in basic terms, on measuring the availability of a power generation unit and it is calculated using the maximum theoretical output of the unit over a period of time, compared to how much it actually produced.
When a unit is offline for repairs – whether planned maintenance or unplanned breakdowns – the time it spent offline contributes to lower EAF.
"The plants have been forced to continue operating at the expense of their technical condition. The consequences are reflected in the high number of incidents, trips and partial load losses (PLL)," the OPERA report reads.
It added:
Partial load losses refers to the electricity generation capacity lost on any unit due to faults that are causing it to operate at less-than-optimal capacity.
Across the fleet of 14 coal-fired power stations, nearly 6 000 megawatts of generation capacity is not available due to partial load losses, the report reveals.
This is equal to Stage 6 load shedding that, the experts said, could be recovered by "applying prudent operation and maintenance practice".
This is a developing story.
