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You have to love election season.

Eskom just about clung on, with the odd bout of load shedding in the lead-up to the local elections on November 1.

Now that we’ve ticked that box, it’s back to business as usual and a power grid that is completely unable to put up with demand.

Yesterday’s announcement that we were moving to Stage 4 came with less than half an hour’s notice. It’s not like students around the country are studying for exams, or businesses are desperately planning ways to work around not having electricity.

For all the talk of wet coal and those other excuses we’ve grown used to, the situation at Kusile power station is of dire concern.

The power station is one of the country’s newest. Rather than operating efficiently enough to allow for repairs elsewhere, it’s actually only producing a quarter of the electricity it’s supposed to.

Talking to News24, energy expert Chris Yelland points out why this is so disastrous:

Medupi and Kusile were supposed to add 9 600 MW of power to the national grid by 2015, which would have gone a long way to stopping the need for load shedding…

According to the Integrated Resource Plan 2019, the state’s official blueprint for future energy generation, Kusile should in 2021 have an EAF [energy availability factor] of 77%.

“A new plant operating as a workhorse should be operating at a 90% energy availability factor,” he told Fin24. “If you switch this thing on it should stay on for most of the time.”

It doesn’t help that Medupi recently suffered an explosion, with repair costs likely to run into the billions of rands.

Rather than chugging along at 90%, Kusile’s EAF has fallen to 24,5%.

The knock-on effect of that affects the entire power grid:

Apart from contributing to the throttling of the country’s power supply, Yelland said Kusile’s poor performance has a secondary impact. When it can’t produce the power it is supposed to, other plants have to shoulder the burden.

This, in turn, means Eskom can’t take them offline for repairs and maintenance, which raises the likelihood that they will suffer breakdowns.

Meanwhile, the power utility has to keep running expensive diesel peaking power stations longer than planned, adding to the billions of rands it spends annually in fuel.

To keep the lights on, Eskom has been ploughing through diesel, and last week warned that diesel supplies are “critically low”.

The price of diesel has also shot up in recent weeks.

Yelland said an explanation for Kusile’s poor performance is that it was handed over prematurely. This, coupled with its well-documented design problems, means it has never neared the EAF expected of it.

The plant is also billions of rands over budget and will now only be completed in 2025, about 10 years late. Corruption allegations have also dogged almost all stages of its construction. The NPA has charged five people with paying bribes in an ongoing case.

Add that to the ‘knee guard fiasco’ and it’s easy to understand why we’re spending hours a day without power.

If you’ve somehow made it this far without EskomSePush, here’s a reminder that it’s the simplest way of understanding the load shedding schedule.

You’ll still be stung by Eskom’s last-minute announcements, but that is the nature of the beast.

[source:news24]