power – praag.org

Medupi online as Koeberg switches off

Medupi’s Unit 6 has officially gone online.

It was launched by President Jacob Zuma in Limpopo on Sunday.

The unit will pump a much-needed 800 megawatts into the country’s electricity supply.

President Zuma says the economy will benefit from the switch-on.

But at the same time, Koeberg’s Unit 2 will be offline for three months of scheduled maintenance, starting on Tuesday.

It will see about 930 megawatts taken off the grid.

Despite this, Eskom says it doesn’t foresee power outages linked to the Koeberg work.

Police clash with Medupi strikers

Police have clashed with striking workers at various hostels housing construction workers of Medupi Power Station in Limpopo.

The workers had barricaded the streets and entrances to the hostels preventing buses to pick up workers to the construction site.

They are burning tyres and pelting stones at motorists.

Police nyalas and water tankers have been deployed in the area.

On Tuesday the striking workers refused Eskom’s offer to return to work on Wednesday.

The workers are demanding that those dismissed be reinstated unconditionally.

The utility had on Tuesday confirmed it will reinstate the 1 700 workers who were fired for vandalising property during the strike.

Labour disruption and technical faults have increased costs at Eskom’s Medupi coal-fired plant, expected to start generating 800 megawatts of extra electricity by July.

Meanwhile Eskom implemented stage 2 load shedding from 06:00 on Wednesday morning.

This followed stage 2 and stage 3 load shedding on Tuesday, with Eskom assuring customers that load shedding is implemented as a necessary measure to protect the power system.

Deferred generator maintenance has caused an overload of unplanned repairs, resulting in a week of darkness for South Africa.

Israel turns off power to Palestinians

The Los Angeles Times reports Israel cut the power to more than 700,000 Palestinians in two of Palestine’s largest urban areas, Nablus and Jenin, for more than 45 minutes “and warned that more outages are coming if Palestinian officials don’t pay millions of dollars in outstanding debt.”

Citing Yiftah Ron-Tal, the director of Israel Electric Corp. (IEC), the Times reports:

“Customers who do not pay electric bills are disconnected; yet here we have an entire population that doesn’t pay while we continue to supply electricity,” he said. “The Palestinian Authority owes the IEC — meaning the paying consumers — nearly 2 billion Israeli shekels [about $500 million]. A year has passed since I said this last and nothing has changed. Starting today, we will begin restricting electricity.”

The irony here, of withholding the months of tax revenue while demanding payment of a debt, on top of occupation policy preventing Palestinians from being self sufficient, is not lost on anyone. More from the Times:

“This is clearly collective punishment against the Palestinian people,” [Ghassan Shakaa, the mayor of Nablus and chairman of the board of the North Electricity Company, which supplies Nablus, Jenin] said. According to Shakaa, the IEC cut power shortly after notifying his company that it owed more than $10 million, and did not wait for an answer or for payment……

Rashid Fadda, who lives in Nablus and works as a technician for the local electric company, said the power cuts came as a surprise.

“We heard the Israeli company threatening to cut power supply to the West Bank but no one really thought it will happen,” he said. “My work depends on electricity and so when the power was cut off, we had to stop work.”

In more winter news, IMEMC reports settlers from the Gilo settlement have “opened its barrages, throwing all excess rain and melted snow water” flooding Aida Refugee camp near Bethlehem.

Israel opened dams near the border of Gaza on Sunday morning, flooding the valley causing hundreds of Palestinians to evacuate their homes.

Source: mondoweiss.net

Crisis, what crisis? – Eksdom

THE country is not experiencing a power supply crisis, Eskom said on Monday.

“There is no crisis at Eskom. I think the way Eskom gets reported on creates the perception of a crisis,” CEO Tshediso Matona told reporters in Johannesburg.

Mr Matona said the power utility needed financial stability and additional power to make sure electricity supply was reliable.

He said Eskom sold power cheaply.

“We sell electricity below cost compared to other countries. We have spoken about this before … It is a matter of policy implementation, which we do not do ourselves.”

Eskom did not anticipate implementing its stage-three schedule of rolling blackouts again this month, he said.

“We will probably not go into stage three from this difficult patch, but that will rely on additional power capacity going forward,” Mr Matona said.

Stage one allows for up to 1,000MW of the national load to be shed, stage two for up to 2,000MW and stage three for up to 4,000MW.

Stage-two blackouts went into action on Thursday and stage three on Friday.

Eskom was doing everything possible to manage the outages, Mr Matona said.

“It really pains us to have to load-shed. We know the public is not pleased.”

He said a complete blackout would spell disaster for the country.

“We load-shed out of responsibility … A complete blackout would be catastrophic and can take weeks to recover from.”

Group executive Matshela Koko said he led an investigation into the collapse of the silo at Majuba.

“Majuba is urgent … yes, we had a second crack at Majuba, and we will soon take the public into (our) confidence,” Mr Koko said.

Mr Matona said the blackouts had also affected customers in neighbouring countries.

“There is a perception that we load-shed but continue supplying neighbours with electricity. That is not so, cross-border customers are also affected.”

Mr Matona said electricity supply was expected to be constrained in February and March because of budgetary constraints.

“Our financial director is looking at options in this regard,” he said.

The power supply would depend on the availability of diesel during the period.

Eskom used 140-million litres of diesel to produce power in November.

“We have had situations during this past week where the ordering of diesel was delayed due to budget constraints,” said Mr Matona.

“Sometimes, in terms of logistics, things do not go smoothly between us, PetroSA and other suppliers,” he said.

No power cuts says Eskom

There will not be power cuts as a result of the Majuba power station crisis anywhere in the country, Eskom said.

“There will be no load shedding today . We managed to restore coal supplies to two of the six units at the Majuba power station. This means that one third of the power station’s normal capacity is back in service,” said spokesman Andrew Etzinger.

“As a result Eskom is not needing to implement load shedding during the day. However, the power system remains under pressure and consumers are urged to use electricity sparingly for the remainder of the week.”

A coal storage silo at the Majuba power station in Mpumalanga cracked on Saturday and later collapsed. Etzinger said as a result coal conveyor systems were damaged.

Yesterday, alternative measures were put in place to deliver the coal needed.

“For units one and two, we had to bring in coal through an alternative delivery mechanism involving the trucking of coal,” he said.

“Then the coals were placed on mobile conveyors using front-end loaders, and the current rate 1200 tonnes of coal per hour were being brought in.”

Eskom was working on a similar solution for delivering coal to units five and six. He said units three and four were not affected.

The operation involved excess manpower and cost but Etzinger could not immediately provide figures.

Source: Sapa

Tutu leads the climate divestment charge

John D. Rockefeller built a vast fortune on oil. Now his heirs are abandoning fossil fuels.

The family whose legendary wealth flowed from Standard Oil is planning to announce on Monday that its $860 million philanthropic organization, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is joining the divestment movement.

The announcement, timed to precede Tuesday’s opening of the United Nations climate change summit meeting in New York City, is part of a broader and accelerating initiative.

In recent years, 180 institutions — including philanthropies, religious organizations, pension funds and local governments — as well as hundreds of wealthy individual investors have pledged to sell assets tied to fossil fuel companies from their portfolios and to invest in cleaner alternatives. In all, the groups have pledged to divest assets worth more than $50 billion from portfolios, and the individuals more than $1 billion, according to Arabella Advisors, a firm that consults with philanthropists and investors to use their resources to achieve social goals.

Some say they are taking action to align their assets with their environmental principles. Others want to shame companies that they believe are recklessly contributing to a warming planet. Still others say that the fight to limit climate change will lead to new regulations and disruptive new technologies that will make these companies an increasingly risky investment.

Ultimately, the activist investors say, their actions, like those of the anti-apartheid divestment fights of the 1980s, could help spur international debate, while the shift of investment funds to energy alternatives could lead to solutions to the carbon puzzle.

Among the individual investors joining in the announcement on Monday is Mark Ruffalo, the actor. The news conference will include a videotaped message from Bishop Desmond Tutu, who said that because climate change has a disproportionate impact on the poor, it is “the human rights challenge of our time.”

Just how transparent the various funds and institutions will be about the progress of their asset sales is uncertain.

The family has also engaged in shareholder activism with Exxon Mobil, the largest successor to Standard Oil.

Members have met privately with the company over the years in efforts to get it to moderate its stance on issues pertaining to the environment and climate change. They acknowledged that they have not caused the company to greatly alter its course.

Other unlikely supporters also chimed in. Leonardo DiCaprio was one of them.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt announced Monday that the firm would sever ties with a controversial conservative group because of its position on climate change.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a prominent network of conservative state legislators works to roll back laws that promote solar and wind power.

Source: NYT/Bloomberg

Nuclear trumps shale and gas

The signing in Vienna – at the margins of the 58th session of the International Atomic Energy Agency General Conference – of a strategic nuclear partnership between Russia and South Africa, has met with criticism from the mining sector.

The agreement lays the foundation for a large-scale nuclear power plant procurement and development programme of South Africa based on the construction of new nuclear power plants with Russian VVER reactors with a total installed capacity of up to 9,6 GW or 8 units.

These will be the first based on the Russian technology to be built on the African continent.

The signed agreement provides for comprehensive collaboration in other areas of nuclear power, including the construction of a Russian-technology based multipurpose research reactor, assistance in the development of South African nuclear infrastructure, and education of South African nuclear specialists.

The creation of new highly-skilled workplaces will also allow South African companies to further participate in Rosatom’s projects in third countries.

South Africa’s industry will become dependent on sources other than shale and coal, critics say. While industry and certain role players obsess about shale and gas, Mozambique’s gas resources will also need expensive infrastructure.

The questionable benefits that shale gas might offer, will be short-lived, unlike nuclear.

This agreement would naturally limit South Africa’s importation of energy from Namibia or Mozambique.

Also, this will probably mean an end to preferential electricity contracts that offer power at a rate far below the level other industrial users pay, to companies like BHP Billiton.

The R9,5bn lost in embedded derivatives, as reported by Eskom, is the cost of the remaining time on these preferential electricity contracts, some of which still have years to run.

Other energy sources will be hydroelectric power from the future Inga III dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

South Africa’s nuclear power ambitions had attracted several proposals.

French group Areva, which built South Africa’s only nuclear plant at Koeberg, had proposed to provide the country with its new generation of EPR reactors.

Government had also solicited an offer from the US-Japanese group Westinghouse.

Power restored in some parts of Johannesburg

Power was restored in Lawley and Lenasia South on Friday while other parts of Johannesburg could be left in the dark over the weekend, City Power said.

“It will take a maximum of two to three days to restore power to all effected areas,” City Power said.

It gave the same prediction on Thursday, but on Friday stressed that on-going work would see suburbs gradually restored over this period.

The power supply to parts of the West Rand and northern Johannesburg was disrupted when a few hundred City Power staff downed tools on Wednesday afternoon. City Power said the strike was not union-led.

The workers were unhappy about a new shift system the power distributor was implementing.

It was believed that the striking workers had sabotaged the infrastructure causing the widespread blackouts, which impacted on traffic flow and affected some businesses’ operations.

One substation appeared to have been tampered with and at another the power equipment appeared to have been manually put down.

Police were investigating and security guards had been appointed to watch the stations.

City Power was using contractors to try and fix the problems.

It said that electricity had not yet been restored to Houghton Estate, where former president Nelson Mandela is recuperating, in a medical facility set up at his home, after his discharge from hospital at the weekend.

City Power provided a back-up generator to the vicinity of Mandela’s home on Wednesday night, and this remained in place on Friday morning.

City Power’s engineering operations director Louis Pieterse said in an interview on Radio 702 on Friday that the new shift system, which sparked the strike, was intended to cut costs associated with overtime.

“Seventy-eight percent of the year falls outside normal working hours,” he said.

As overtime was expensive. City Power believed that the funds saved through implementing a shift system could be better used, for example more people could be employed.

Pieterse said workers were not yet ready to negotiate on the matter.

“If staff were willing to talk, we could get to a solution.”

On Thursday, Democratic Alliance spokesman on infrastructure services in Johannesburg Denis Hunt said City Power’s new shift system would result in a decrease in workers’ take-home pay.

He also raised concerns that City Power was understaffed.

“The members of the DA sitting in the section 79 oversight committee have for months drawn attention to the perilously low level of staffing at City Power, in many areas being below the full complement by 50 percent and more.

“… In a market where competing for skills has become the norm and finding qualified people willing to work in these conditions is difficult, to introduce a working structure which reduces what the workers have come to expect is suicidal.”

Hunt said the power problems could lead to economic losses in the city.

On Thursday afternoon, power had been restored to the Hursthill and Mayfair substations which supply Auckland Park, Bosmont, Crosby, Emmarentia, Mayfair, Northcliff, Rosebank, Riverlea and the Westdene areas; and to the Cydna and Alexandra and Gresswold substations which supply Athol, Alexandra, Bramley, Hyde Park, Melrose, Riverpark, Tsutsumani and the Wynberg areas.

On Friday morning, however, City Power said the supply to residents’ homes in areas such as Northcliff was yet to be restored, despite progress towards this having been made. – Sapa

Power cuts cause road chaos in and around Johannesburg

Traffic was affected by power outages on the West Rand and parts of northern Johannesburg on Thursday morning, Johannesburg metro police department (JMPD) said.

“We are experiencing power outages in the West Rand: Roodepoort, Florida, Constantia Kloof. Also, as well as in Rosebank, and along William Nicol in the Fourways area,” said Inspector Edna Mamonyane.

Traffic lights usually fail during power outages.

“We advise motorists to please be patient and respect one another as we know that people are going to be edgy and late for work,” she said.

“JMPD and the Outsurance points people are going to do the best they can under the circumstances but unfortunately will not be able to cover each and every affected intersection.” – Sapa