Author Archive for: Engineering News

From the moment Mpho Putsoenyane’s daughter Hlompho was born in Zamdela, a South African township beside the smokestacks and gas flares of Sasol’s oldest coal-to-liquid refinery, the baby struggled to breathe. Last year, when she was four months old, she turned purple and started gasping. Her parents rushed the baby to hospital, where medics only just revived her heart with a defibrillator, Putsoenyane recalls.

Nine people were injured at Eskom’s Matla power station on December 12 when a transformer exploded, affecting Unit 6. As a precautionary measure, Unit 5 was also taken offline to ensure the safety of all employees and contractors on-site.

The selection of Pele Green Energy (PGE) to supply renewable energy to the South African ferrochrome smelters operated by the Glencore Merafe Venture represents an important milestone in the steady yet uneven evolution of South Africa’s electricity industry. Its significance is not immediately apparent, largely because the novelty of such multidecade power purchase agreements (PPAs) between electricity-intensive private firms and independent power producers (IPPs) has worn off somewhat three-and-a-half years after President Cyril Ramaphosa successfully twisted a reluctant Gwede Mantashe’s arm to enable such deals at scale.

State-owned power utility Eskom has welcomed the separate sentencing of two individuals for theft of cables near the Duvha power station, in Mpumalanga, and said it was committed to safeguarding the security and integrity of its critical infrastructure. The utility has welcomed the 15-year prison sentence handed down to one person for the March theft of copper cable from the Duvha power station’s coal conveyor belt, as well as the five-year prison sentence handed down to another for the theft of aluminium cables near the power station. The sentences were handed down in October.

A newly released report by technology and lifecycle solutions provider Wärtsilä shows that an area the size of Europe will need to be covered with renewable power to reach a clean energy future without the integration of balancing power technologies. Wärtsilä’s global power system modelling, published in the ‘Crossroads to net zero’ report, compares two pathways from 2025 to 2050 with the aim of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and limiting global warming in alignment with the Paris Agreement targets.