Technology |
 |
Mandate
Technology is mandated to assure the integrity of Eskom plant and contributes to the effective
and safe operation of operating units by standardising and optimising asset maintenance,
through robust outage management, asset management and design-base management through
engineering expertise.
Operating highlights
| • |
The improved safety performance can be attributed to successful safety forums, safety pledges
by management, staff and partners, implementation of key safety deliverables and sustained
commitment by safety officers and partners on sites |
| • |
Outage management executed a high number of outages. Various initiatives have been
implemented to influence and improve outage performance, including:
| - |
Gold Standard – identified and codified best practices have been disseminated across the
fleet to change the way Eskom conducts its work. To date over 100 people across sites have
been trained |
| - |
An outage performance improvement centre has successfully developed and run a
number of elements such as daily calls, partner reviews, safety forums, daily deep-dive
sessions and site support visits, amongst others. An increased onsite presence has resulted
in better transparency and issue resolution |
| - |
Site visit teams provided targeted assistance at high risk stations, which included fire
fighting and addressing strategic and systemic issues like contractor productivity, spares
availability and interface issues |
|
| • |
Project Engineering has operationalised the registration of engineering work from the business
partners (Group Capital and Generation) through a structured order book management process
and an operational database |
Operating challenges
| • |
Constraints in electricity capacity have compelled execution of high-risk outages over shorter
planned durations, thus increasing the likelihood of slips |
| • |
Significant emergent scope: turbine plant maintenance is extremely prone to scope extensions
due to the difficulty of accurately determining the exact scope upfront while the system is still
sealed |
| • |
Poor plant performance and reliability, as a significant number of power stations are operating
beyond their design lives |
Future focus areas
| • |
Safety practices |
| • |
Improving quality controls around outage management |
| • |
Monitoring the resolution of contractor defects reported at Medupi and Kusile power stations |
| • |
Partnering between Project Engineering and Generation to address the unplanned outages
that occur after return from planned outages |
|
