Cape Town – Eskom has escalated load shedding from stage 2 to stage 4 until 05:00 on Thursday after three Kendal generation units tripped.
Thereafter, load shedding will revert back to stage 2 at midnight on Friday, said the power utility in a statement.
“In the early hours of this morning a conveyor belt feeding coal into Kendal power station failed. To converse coal, the power outputs of the generators was reduced, but this required fuel oil to be used to sustain the boiler combustion. Subsequently, the fuel oil plan supplying the units experienced a failure and shutdown. This resulted in the trip of the three-generation units. The Kendal units are anticipated to return to service by the weekend,” said the statement.
Loadshedding has been increased to Stage 4 until 05:00 on Thursday as three Kendal generation
units tripped. Thereafter it will revert to Stage 2 until midnight Friday. pic.twitter.com/iLKQaNO37P— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) September 13, 2022
Prior to this, a generation unit each at Arnot and Medupi power stations had been taken offline for emergency repair and the breakdown had resulted in intense usage of the pumped storage schemes and the Open Cycle Gas Turbines.
“These emergency generation reserves are designed to fill the generation gap resulting from exactly this kind of emergency, and obviously cannot be used continuously,” read the statement.
Currently, there are 5 446MW on planned maintenance while another 16 985MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns, said Eskom.
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Picture: Twitter/ @Eskom_SA
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Compiled by Olwethu Mpeshe
