South Africa came dangerously close to another round of load shedding back in August, but we managed to dodge that bullet.

Then last week, during what was actually a pretty decent day, the EskomSePush app informed me that load shedding was back with a vengeance.

Day ruined. Productivity down the toilet.

Eskom then gave us a couple of reasons why we were in the dark again.

One of the main issues seemed to stem from the Medupi power station. Eskom tried to downplay it, but it looks like things are actually worse than they’d like us to believe.

MyBroadband, with this:

Following major problems that brought Eskom’s Medupi power station to its knees during the height of the load-shedding last week, Medupi’s power station manager, Rudi van der Wal, is leaving Eskom to take up a position overseas.

Van der Wal had already resigned before the latest round of problems, but his departure was sped up.

Other staff at Medupi have been dismissed for negligence by Eskom’s head of generation, Bheki Nxumalo, in what Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer calls “consequence management”, following a number of major problems at Medupi that contributed to the load shedding last week.

Additional problems at Medupi power station that have not been previously disclosed to the public by Eskom’s management have now been identified, and Medupi and Kusile are emerging as major threats to the adequacy of the power system to meet demand in South Africa.

Before we continue, let’s take a look at a comprehensive list of everything that’s wrong with the plant.

For a while now, the stackers that load coal from Exxaro’s Grootegeluk mine onto the stockpiles at the Medupi stockyard, and the reclaimers that take coal from the stockpiles to feed coal by conveyor to the power station boilers, have not been operational.

To get fuel to the Medupi boilers, the coal stockyard was bypassed and the single main coal conveyor feed from Grootegeluk mine was feeding the power station directly, without any redundancy in the system. So, effectively, Medupi was running with minimal coal stock at its disposal.

Subsequently, when the 4.5km single main coal conveyor feed from the Grootegeluk mine failed with a broken belt, Medupi was left with no coal feeding its boilers other than about one or two shifts worth of fuel in the bunkers at each boiler.

To add to the disaster, it is now clear that blocked chute and belt rip detectors on the conveyor were not working. Thus, the conveyor did not trip when it should have done so in order to protect the system. This caused damage to some 700m of the belt, as well to the conveyor structures.

Buckle up, because it gets worse. The company decided to go old school to try and fix the problem, with limited success:

This was a major logistical nightmare due to the huge volumes of coal involved. Major congestion of coal trucks transporting coal from the stockyard to the bunkers forced the power output of Medupi to be reduced to a third of normal, contributing to load-shedding.

Then problems were experienced with the ash-handling plant, which conveys ash from coal that is burned in the boilers to the ash dumps. Staff working on the bunker feed problems were shifted to deal with the huge build-up of ash, thus compounding the problems.

There’s some good news. The main coal conveyor from Exxaro’s mine is expected to be up and running again soon – or “now now”, which is a more accurate and South African way of saying “at some indefinable point”. When this happens, they’ll be able to retire the trucks that have been transporting the coal thus far.

For a list of everything that’s wrong with the power station, head here.

I’m not going to get my hopes up too high.

It’s likely that we’ll be dealing with load shedding for the foreseeable future.

Charge those power banks, people.

[source:mybroadband]