The communities of the Highveld Region of Mpumalanga, home to most of Eskom coal-fired power stations, are fighting on both fronts of the electricity crisis: there’s the economic effects of loadshedding, and then the closure of coal power stations. It’s an untenable situation for most locals, and now they also face further penalties because of increasing electricity tariffs and income loss from underperforming power stations.
“The challenges to these power stations are known, it is in fact disturbing that the General Manager of Tutuka power station in particular is a failure and yet he is still occupying the position,” says National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Highveld Deputy Regional Secretary Thapelo Malekutu.
“Since he arrived at Tutuka, the power station is underperforming. His focus is on bodyguards that are always surrounding him, as if he is acting a movie but suffering from a colossal failure to turn around the power station.”
Given the revelations around the attempt on Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter’s life, you would be hard-pressed to accuse the GM in question, Sello Mametja, of being overly cautious.
Even the outgoing Eskom CEO was quick to call out the excellent work Mametja did to expose criminal syndicates contributing to the corruption at the plant.
With an energy availability factor of under 25 percent, Tutuka leads the top six problematic power stations in the Eskom fleet – namely Duvha, Majuba, Kusile, Matla and Callide.
Malekutu named some of these power stations while expressing NUM concerns. The union is worried that loadshedding would continue to engulf the country because of the power stations such as Kendal, Matla and Tutuka were not operating in full capacity.
Meanwhile its trade union counterpart, National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), says that loadshedding was being used to justify privatisation because Renewable Energy power was not enough to light up the entire country.
Banging the baseload drum
“You cannot power the economy on renewable energy. The current fleet of power stations is capable of delivering that capacity. The problem is that there is no appetite from Eskom, Pravin and Cyril to maintain the coal fired fleet due to calls by privately owned renewable energy companies to dismantle all of them without a viable solution,” said Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, the national spokesperson for NUMSA.
She said that the rolling out more renewable Independent Power Producers (IPP’s) would not solve the problem because Renewable Energy was not a sustainable form of energy to power an economy.
Hlubi-Majola cited the classic anti-renewables rhetoric, listing solar energy dependence on the sun as a cause for concern when there are outages in the evening. While it is true that solar energy is not available to kick-in and supplement the grid at night, it could be used as part of the energy mix during the day.
“We will still need coal or nuclear to drive the economy. The Eskom system operator 2021 expressly states, ‘improve plant performance fleet as this remains the largest lever to restore system adequacy by expediting the Reliability Maintenance Recovery Program to improve predictability of performance in the future,’” Hlubi-Majola continues.
“What this means is that by Eskom’s own assessment, the fastest solution to ending load shedding is to fix the current coal fleet which we have. We have been failing to fix the fleet because we are led by a clueless team of Eskom executives who have no idea how to execute this work properly.”
