South Africans is faced with severe outages for the week ahead after a coal silo collapsed at Eskom’s Majuba power station in Mpumalanga on Sunday. Energy analyst Chris Yelland took to Twitter on Sunday to bring clarity to the matter, explaining that the load shedding on Sunday was a “good plan”. “I have [it] on impeccable authority that all 6 x 640 MW units at Eskom’s Majuba power station are out of service today [Sunday], but Majuba has six hours of coal available in their bunkers if they were to run at full capacity tomorrow, or 12 hours at half capacity,” he tweeted.
“So Eskom has chosen to run Majuba at half capacity (1800 MW) tomorrow (Monday) for 12 hours to get through the day and evening peak, after which Majuba will run out of coal, unless temporary bypass conveyors can be put in place to keep coal flowing to the boilers. “It was good plan by Eskom to shut down Majuba fully with Stage 2 load shedding (2000 MW) on a Sunday, and keep some reserve coal for Monday.”
Eskom would bring mobile coal conveyer belts from other stations to Majuba as a temporary solution, but this would take time, Eskom spokesperson Andrew Etzinger said.
Well, our comment is clear: If ESKOM would not have slept through all developments in the recent decade and would not have replaced international engineers and power plant experts by unqualified and inexperienced local staff, we would actually enjoy the seamless powerflow the country needs to function.