MEDIA XXX STATEMENT
Eskom Kendal Power Station Mpumalanga.
Eskom makes major strides in its operational recovery process, cautions the path to sustainability will be long and hard Thursday, 27 January 2022: While Eskom continues to make major positive strides and delivering key milestones in its plan to operational recovery, the road to sustainability will still be long and hard. Major projects and outages undertaken this year will continue to exert pressure on the supply side, raising the risk of loadshedding in the short term. These outages, however, are necessary interventions that will deliver long term benefits and the security of energy supply. Reproduced here from: https://www.eskom.co.za/eskom-makes-major-strides-in-its-operational-recovery-processcautions-the-path-to-sustainability-will-be-long-and-hard/
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espite our good performance in recent weeks, particularly over the festive season, surpassing that of the previous quarter as well as the same period in 2020, much still needs to be done for Eskom to achieve operational sustainability and ensure energy security for South Africa,” said André de Ruyter, Eskom’s Group Chief Executive. Key among these are the interventions to extend the operating life of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, which will see the facility operating at half its generating capacity for most of the year. “As we continue to turn around the situation in less than ideal circumstances, we would like to caution against
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increasing criminal activities on our networks and our assets, which result in increased risks of customer interruptions, public safety concerns and financial losses. We urge security and law enforcement agencies to deal decisively with these criminal elements as their activities could have a very negative impact on our economy if not addressed decisively,” added De Ruyter. De Ruyter added that Eskom had deployed an additional 450 security guards to its key sites, and was using advanced surveillance technologies such as intelligent cameras and drones equipped with infrared cameras to protect its assets. Further overt and covert surveillance and intelligence gathering were being put in place to prevent
SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA FEBRUARY 2022
criminals from causing damage to the Eskom system. Having been synchronised to the grid for the first time during December 2021, on 11 January 2022 Unit 4 of the Kusile Power Station achieved full load of 800MW. The unit is going through the testing and optimisation phase and will contribute intermittently to the national grid over the period to full commercial operation by July 2022. Unit 2 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station has recently been taken offline for a long-term outage, whose major project is to extend the operating life of the power station by another 20 years. Considering that the power station has been largely depreciated, the steam generator replacement (SGR) project, at a
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