South Africa – Eskom has officially announced that Medupi Unit 6 was successfully synchronised to the national power grid for the first time on Monday, 2 March 2015, and is currently being progressively tested and optimised to enable it to join the Eskom Generation fleet as a significant contributor to the country’s constrained power supply.
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Medupi consists of six units of approximately 800 MW each, for a grand total of 4800 MW, which is 12% of Eskom’s total installed capacity. Eskom is pulling out all stops to ensure that the completion of the remaining five units is not hampered by technical or labour issues.
The synchronisation process will take time to ensure that the power it delivers is stable, consistent and reliable. This is also to ensure that the unit is safe to operate, and will perform exactly as designed for the next fifty years. From its first synchronisation, the unit has been delivering 400 MW, but because of the testing and combustion optimisation, this power is delivered intermittently, and this will continue until full power (800 MW) is reached around end-May 2015. Further testing and fine-tuning will be performed until the Project is satisfied that the system is fully operable and reliable for final handover.
