Very insightful read

Focus on improving EAF as a quick win to stop loadshedding

https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/opinion-focus-on-improving-eaf-as-a-quick-win-to-stop-loadshedding-2023-01-12/rep_id:4136

You can't really look at their low availability in the same way you would a traditional manufacturing plant

They are so captured and in-grained with corruption that they have to overcome intentional sabotage and plain incompetence in repairs.

If you look at the number of tube failures (in the high pressure steam lines of most coal plants) they are astronomically higher than the global average for the same design.

Why?

It's incompetence in operation - boiler operation [especially with shoddy coal supply] can be hard to control under these conditions.

equipment is old and unreliable

when a tube ruptures, it takes out the closest 50 tubes. You have to then cut through a wall of WORKING tubes to reach and repair these, then weld everything back together.

If even one tube is incorrectly welded, the rupture takes out another 20

everytime you cut and re-weld, you introduce failure points

 

The government is also unwillingly to suffer the pain.

They are trying so desperately to pretend loadshedding doesn't exist (e.g. over christmas etc.) that they don't give the maintenance people the proper time to do things right. Everything is a patch on a patch on a different patch.

 

What they really needed to do (besides all the corruption) was suffer the 2-3 months of Stage 6 (back when stage 1-2 was the norm) and DO THE BLOODY MAINTENANCE

 

Now we're at a constant stage 4-6 and would need to go up to 8 to do any substantial repairs

 

im just rambling 

EDIT: just finished reading the article, they basically come to the same conclusion

Edited January 12, 20232 yr by jeddles

Yeah you are 100% correct - the corruption will need to be sorted out FIRST before any of these other remedies can be considered.

I enjoyed the article as it was written by an engineer who from my basic understanding seems to know what he is talking about - better than the usual stuff we get on MYBB, News24 etc. just telling us how bad it is.  We know its bad - how do we fix it...