Majuba Power Station

History:

Construction at the Majuba site started in September 1983 and the first unit went on load on 1 April 1996. The last unit was handed over to Eskom by the contractors on 1 April 2001. The station is 8 years old this year.

General:

Majuba is Eskom's only power station that is not linked to a specific mine and it receives its coal from various sources, and what makes this power station unique is that three of its units is dry cooled, where the usual power stations is wet cooled by means of cooling towers. These initiatives arise from the shortage of water in the area of Ammersfoort.

Technical details:
• Three 665MW dry-cooled units
• Three 716MW wet-cooled units
• Installed capacity: 4 110MW
• 2001 capacity: 3 843MW
• Design efficiency at rated turbine MCR (%): 35.30% (dry-cooled) : 37.70% (wet-cooled)
• Ramp rate: 16.67% per hour (dry-cooled)
• Average availability over last 3 years: 97.17% (dry-cooled)
Average production over last 3 years: 5 170GWh (dry-cooled)

WTH Management & training has a team of 7 people on this Power Station and is proud to announce that the first outage planned for December 2008, returned onto load with the minimum complications.
An audit was done from head office that formed part of the QMS implementation plan for Eskom Genarations Devision. This audits showed that the management system improved by 80% in the last audit interval. WTH Management & Training is proud to say that we formed part of the team that improved that system by means of implementing controling measures such as Quality Control under the lead of Donal Masemola and Hannes Kraft.

The WTH Management & Training group:

• Hannes Kraft – Quality Control Manager
• Hannes Nel – Welding
• Gerhard du Preez – Turbine Ceter Line
• Alufasi Ndhlovu – Control & Instrumentation
• Barry Janse van Rensburg – Electrical
• Newton du Plessis – Auxilaries
• Hendrik van Wyk – Outside Plant

Achievements