Eskom Adds 800mw Of New Capacity To The Grid

It marks a "crucial step towards completing one of South Africa's largest infrastructure projects and is a key milestone in Eskom's strategic objective of adding 2.5GW of new capacity to the grid by March 2025", the company said in a statement on Sunday.

"Kusile power station will contribute a total of 4.8GW to the national grid once all units are fully operational, making it South Africa's largest infrastructure project. Its sister project, Medupi, will see its unit 4 return 800MW by the end of April 2025 from an extended outage following a generator stator failure. Both South Africa's new-build power station projects will then be essentially completed once Kusile unit 6 is in commercial operation."

Together, the power station builds ran hundreds of billions of rand over budget.

"Eskom is at a critical point in returning megawatts to the grid as we are currently in a constrained state- Our focus is now on ensuring that Kusile unit 6 achieves commercial operation in the second half of 2025, further strengthening South Africa's energy security," said Eskom group executive for generation Bheki Nxumalo in the statement.