Eskom restore Medupi Unit 3 to full capacity after 75-day outage

The lockdown period has given Eskom the chance to catch-up on some desperately urgent maintenance issues at its Medupi power station in Limpopo, and the power supplier have said on Monday 11 May that they have successfully completed work on one of the most troublesome units. 

Eskom said that they ha e returned the unit to full generation capacity and will now look to perform maintenance on other units.

Full capacity  

In a statement, Eskom said that the power unit had been restored after 75-days of outage. 

“Eskom is pleased to announce that since its return to service following a 75-day outage to repair major design defects, Medupi’s Unit 3 has since Tuesday 5 May 2020 reached the full generation capacity of 793 MW.”

Chief Operating Officer Jan Oberholzer said that the efforts were commendable. 

“Eskom commends its guardians and contractors, who worked tirelessly during the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown to execute the outage as planned.”

“Completing Unit 3 outage within time demonstrates Team Medupi and its contractors’ commitment to improving plant performance in terms of availability and reliability.”

Eskom added that the effort would see heightened performance at the plant, and said that the plant would be subjected to performance testing before coming only for public use after 2 500 hours of operation. 

“This critical achievement is laudable as its success is dependent on different role players doing their bit to bring workable solutions.” 

“The mayor focus of the outage was to implement the technically agreed solutions for the boiler issues that hobbled the performance of the unit; these being the boiler plant modifications of the re-heater spray flow, fuels jet fabric filter plant, gas air heater, milling plant, duct erosion, and dust arrestors.” 

“The Unit is currently undergoing optimisation and performance testing prior to conducting the boiler performance verification tests, which require inspections and equipment tests to be conducted after 2 500 hours of operation in order to verify the success of modifications.”

More repairs (and outages) to follow 

Further repairs will be completed to some of the plants other problematic units. 

“Eskom is currently implementing similar modifications for which the level of confidence of success is high on Unit 6, which is on an outage, after which we will move to Unit 1, starting mid-may. 

“Unit 4 will also be taken off the grid in July 2020 for similar modifications. Unit 2 will be taken off the grid in August 2020, followed by unit 5 in November.”