South Africa: Eskom makes R3bn boo-boo

How does a South African state run power company blow R3bn? By running a maintenance test on one of its turbine generators and blowing it up! What the article below neglects to state is that the person that should have had his finger on the manual trip button was not at his post during the test (he was probably sleeping in his Affirmative Action office). ESKOM, during Apartheid, had one of the best safety records of any company, but since the useless ANC gangstered the country, it has become somewhat of a joke. Pre-ANC takeover, ESKOM produced enough cheap electricity to keep not only South Africa going, but most of the African continent. Now, under the ANC, they're lucky if they produce enough electricity to power the country day to day. A few years back, the Nuclear Power Station in Cape Town went off line - again during routine maintenance - when one of the workers forgot a spanner in one of the two turbines - and it went bye-bye when it was turned back on. As a result, the country was reduced to rolling black-outs for months. Now they've managed to blow up another turbine, which will be off-line for a year. This ANC government is a joke. They couldn't implement Affirmative Action quick enough and now the country has run out of skilled workers. During Apartheid there were over 33 000 registered tradesmen and today there are less than 3000. Why? Because the ANC decided that the test standard was too hard for the Blacks to pass and dropped the standard. As a result, masses of unskilled tradies from electricians to fitters-and-turners were unleashed to displace the Whites. Yes, ANC, you reap what you sow.

Johannesburg - It may cost Eskom up to R3bn to replace the turbine generator that spun out of control and burst during a maintenance test near eMalahleni (Witbank).

But almost worse than the monetary damage is the loss of 600MW in generating capacity for more than a year.

It would take more than a year to replace the unit, said Hillary Joffe, Eskom’s head of communications. Unofficial sources reckoned it could take 18 months before a new unit, which would have to be ordered from and specially manufactured by French suppliers, could be put into operation.

Joffe did not give a cost of the repairs. But official sources put the figure as high as R3bn.

Photographs taken to investigate the damage shortly after the accident have since been widely published on the internet and show that the gigantic unit at Duvha, one of Eskom’s biggest power stations, was irreparably damaged by the explosion.

According to Joffe, an overspeed test on the unit was conducted on the evening of February 9. The turbine generator unit normally spins at 3 000 revolutions a minute when it is linked to the national power grid and the network operated at its normal 50 Hz voltage level.

But during the test the unit is disconnected from the national network. A valve controlling an enormous flow of steam to drive the turbine is then gradually opened to raise the pressure of the steam on the turbine. The speed at which the turbine rotates increases as the steam pressure rises.

Joffe said the system has a bolt that starts to cut the rotational speed of the turbine as soon as it goes 10% over the design speed of 3 000 revolutions a minute. This time the safety mechanism failed for some other reason.

As a result the turbine spun faster and faster. The rotational speed increased too quickly for anything to be done before the enormous machine burst with a tremendous explosion, with debris scattering in all directions.

The explosion ripped off several steel plates in the roof of the turbine hall. Pieces of shrapnel made hundreds of holes in the remainder of the 30m-high roof.

Source