Just a general comment on this issue:
ESKOM wants IPPs to provide generation, and Frankfort wants to lessen load-shedding.
It seems unreasonable to Joe Public that ESKOM will block this.
The national grid has to be managed from a complete overview, and this control cannot be relinquished to IPPs with narrow viewpoints. That is a non-negotiable fact.
Frankfort won’t win in court, nor should they.
That said, there is massive common ground here for a negotiated settlement.
Frankfort will be allowed to influence load-shedding when generating more than they use because it is in ESKOM’s interest. What they won’t achieve is to dictate grid operations. It must be on ESKOM’s terms that consider the grid as a whole. That is reasonable, and any IPP would be on similar terms.
Where are the various distribution points where they control the load shedding? They clearly are at a regional level.
And will each area control (do the switching) under instruction from HQ?
Also how is the RE power managed in the case of Frankfort?
Yes, there is a National control, ( Simmerpan, Germiston), then Regional controls ( like Georgedale, KZN) and that devolves down to the depot level, which comprises a group of Transmission substations, then Distribution level depots and so on down to the consumer services.
Yes.
“Also how is the RE power managed in the case of Frankfort?”
I don’t know specifically.
It appears that even at optimum generation Frankfort cannot satisfy its own demand, so they fall under the general LS directives as nett consumers.
I read about so many being spitting mad on this Frankfort thing … no one giving the actual facts, or alternative possibilities, as @plonkster does here when some of us get all get foamy mouth spitting mad. (me being one )
It might be a ministers birthday?
They must have managed to get that Koeberg unit back on line.
The private sector can’t be making that much of a difference just yet so
Doesn’t look that spectacular to me. Eskom is on Stage 4, CoCT is on stage 2 until 8PM (not 10PM, as they often do). Could be that Steenbras has slightly more water to work with with all the rain we’ve been having.
On that topic. Good rains in Angola. Namibia is making 95% of its demand with hydro at the moment…
The Hydro plant is on the Northern border in a town called Ruacana. It has a measly capacity of 374MW (a little over a third of a single reactor at Koeberg, so quite small), but then Namibia’s own demand is also quite modest.
The dams that feed and regulate it are all on the Angolan side.
Yup. But don’t forget that when Eskom buys from SAPP, that electricity always has a fair distance to cover. It comes all the way from the DRC at times, and it comes to SA either via Namibia or Zambia+Zimbabwe.
Yeah I saw that… and all the jokes people were making about it. It’s a generator as large as a house. It has a design life of 60 years, and this one is 15 years old. The outrage seems overblown (I mean, do people even know what they are outraged about anymore?).
And some additional reading from a News24 vs De Ruyter vs Daily Maverick angle (both not for subscribers when I linked them):
From the information News24 has obtained, Fivaz and his colleagues fed De Ruyter and Jan Oberholzer, Eskom’s operations chief, a mixture of fear, fantasy and downright balderdash.
De Ruyter and Oberholzer should have seen through the characters appointed by Fivaz to lead the investigation and through their paper-thin “intelligence reports”, which are no more than very initial tips of random leads that may be true or false.
The fact that De Ruyter went on public television and endorsed the shoddy work of a questionable character, who provided not as much as a shred of evidence for his gratuitous claims, is a crying shame.
Those who funded this investigation for bona fide reasons should reclaim every cent.
TLDR: News24 had access to the same files as Daily Maverick by the sounds of it, but don’t think it’s worth the paper it’s written on:
The GFFR reports – and the organogram – looked slick, but there was nothing to substantiate it. We probed the reports, and the organogram, and asked questions of Eskom and GFFR. But we were never comfortable in publishing investigative news reports based on GFFR’s “intelligence reports” because the evidence wasn’t there. We would not have been able to defend it – to our readers or to the courts.
Eskom is a company riven by corruption, broken by mismanagement and political interference. Of that, there is ample and indisputable evidence.
You don’t need GFFR to tell you that. But these reports don’t cut the mustard.
Sounds a bit weird that they’re only disclosing it on this, the day of De Ruyter’s briefing.
The Fifaz mentioned is the same guy show said the listening device found in his car is a sophisticated piece of electronics.
I have it with a small amount of authority – as much as the grapevine can do anyway – that the device that was presented by the media, which is quite clearly a mass-produced tracking device with no microphones or significant processing power, was not the one found in his car. But of course we will never know now…
)
