Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa is confident that two units at "perennial underperformer" Tutuka power station will come back onstream in September, he said during a media briefing on Sunday.

This comes as the plant got a helping hand from the Resource Mobilisation Fund - a vehicle launched by Business for South Africa (BUSA) earlier this year to support the rollout of president Cyril Ramaphosa's Energy Action Plan.

Tutuka, located in Mpumalanga, has been described as South Africa's worst-performing power station. It has been plagued by criminality and sabotage, and a lack of scheduled maintenance further led to deterioration in its capacity.

It was subject to an oversight visit by Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts in June, while last year, Ramaphosa visited the plant to discuss concerns over its "enormous" challenges of theft, corruption and fraud. More recently, Ramokgopa intervened.

HELP SENT IN
Last week, a few more hands were placed on deck using the RMF. "We have deployed additional resources stationed at Tutuka on Friday just to have a sense from management of where they are. There is a plan to return a number of units into service," Ramokgopa told media on Sunday.

"We are trying to understand the reasons [for Tutuka's underperformance]."

Tutuka, which has six installed units, was scheduled to be shut down between 2030 and 2041, but Eskom has said it is rethinking that decision.

Its Energy Availability Factor (EAF) has in recent years dropped from 98% to 21% – but according to the minister, its dismal performance means, also, that it is a low-hanging fruit.

"This is a big power station in that you have six installed units that should be generating about […] 3 500 MW," he said, adding that this was Eskom's "most pristine, best opportunity to add megawatts".

But thus far, the station's intended turnaround has not materialised. The minister pointed out that Tutuka had not managed to reach its own target EAF of 49% for the financial year, and was facing long-term outages. The unplanned capacity loss factor had surged, he added – 74% against a target of 32%.

Improving Tutuka's performance could relieve at least two stages of load shedding, he explained, given that each stage of load shedding is intended to relieve about 1 000 MW of demand.

"There is about 2500 MW locked into Tutuka. That enables us to deliver a significant dent on load shedding – about two stages. The team is doing everything possible to address this situation," he said.

"There is a plan to return a number of units to service," Ramokgopa said. "[But] that plan has to be robust. On three or four occasions there had been plans to return these units to service, and we have not been able to [do so]. We have promised, and we are not succeeding," he said.

Ramokgopa said a key challenge had been leadership instability at the power station, which meant a turnaround had been difficult to get off the ground. In seven years, the power station has had six general managers.

To this end, Eskom has installed "one of our most experienced engineers", Bruce Moyo, he said.

"We do expect that towards the end of September we should have two of these units back," said Ramokgopa, adding that recent conversations with station management had been "a bit more robust".  

He said some of these discussions had been "a bit more optimistic" and others had been "a bit more conservative" but that more realistic timelines for repairs were being reviewed.

"[W]e do expect that by the end of September we should have about two of these units back, and the conversation there was a bit more robust… We have agreed that we will come back once the team has reconsidered some of the inputs that we have given, to say to us these are the timelines that we have set for ourselves.

"But we are confident that we will see some of these units coming back onstream in September, early September and towards the end of September," he said.