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Koeberg works 'brilliantly'
12/11/2005 14:38 - (SA)
Cape Town - Koeberg's electricity shut down on Friday was a perfect display that its safety procedures worked brilliantly, said a spokesperson for the nuclear power generator.
"The safety procedures responded brilliantly even it was not brilliant for the people left without power," Carin de Villiers said on Saturday.
Large parts of the Western Cape including the whole of Cape Town were left in the dark on Friday afternoon when Koeberg's transmission network "tripped".
De Villiers said one of Koeberg's two generators had been shut down for maintenance leaving the other to supply the electricity.
"But for some reason the transmission network (that distributes the raw power from Koeberg to the rest of the country) had a fault and could not pick up the power supply and so automatically shut down reactors and turbines," she said.
This created a shortage of 900 megga watts of electricity, De Villiers said, contextualising that a small town like Paarl would use 35 megga watts.
In essence what the transmission network did, she said, was to shut down the affected "block" so as not to disrupt the rest of the country.
"Had it not done so the whole country would have been left without power," she said.
Eskom's spokesperson Fani Zulu said back-up systems immediately sprang into action all over the country.
The gas turbines in Acacia Park (near Goodwood, Cape Town) and Port Elizabeth (Port Rex) began producing as well as two hydro stations on the Orange River and a Hydro pump storage facility in Cape Town (Palmiet), he said.
"What this did was stabilise the network. National Control then told other electricity generators to increase production and pumped power from Mpumalanga down to Cape Town via the 400 kilo volts line," he said.
This was done within 40 minutes of Koeberg shutting down.
Zulu noted that Cape Town and surrounds had power on Saturday morning thanks to Mpumalanga's coal generators.
De Villiers said Koeberg's turbines were being restarted on Saturday and hoped it would be running at full capacity by the evening.
She said many nervous calls from affected people had been received when the power went down and as a result they were forced to re-man their call centre on Friday night.
"We even had people believing that Green Peace (environmental action group), who are in the harbour at the moment, were responsible for shutting down Koeberg," she said.
The outage left hundreds of people stranded in lifts and traffic jams as far a field as Hermanus and Swellendam.
Zulu, who apologised for the power cut, agreed De Villiers in that it proved safety and back-up procedures worked well.
"Not only did Koeberg shut down but the transmission network was able to redirect power from other parts of the country. The system works," he said.
- SAPA
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