Last week Thursday, generation capacity was lost from five generating units at Kendal and a unit at Duvha power stations.
Due to the loss of five generating units at Kendal Power Station and a generating unit at Duvha Power Station, Stage 4 loadshedding was implemented on Friday, the 24th February 2024.
Eskom said in a statement yesterday, that
this resulted in the need to ramp up loadshedding to Stage 4.
Eskom elaborated on the events that led to the loss of generating capacity at Kendal Power Station units. “Kendal Unit 1 was taken offline on Wednesday at 20:00 due to leaking safety valves, which caused the capacity of the demineralised water storage tanks to run low.”
While recovering the storage water tanks, a contamination incident occurred in the water treatment plant, which led to the isolation of the plant to further investigate.
During this period of investigation, the level of auxiliary cooling water, which also uses demineralised water, ran low.
This led to capacity loss from four generating units at 2:00am on Saturday morning.
The team has returned the first unit back into service, and two more are planned to be returned today.