State-owned power utility Eskom has handed over evidence of alleged sabotage at Lethabo Power Station in Vereeniging, south of Johannesburg, to the Hawks, says CEO Andre de Ruyter.
The unknown perpetrators allegedly cut the stays attached to the pylon power lines that feed electricity to the power station causing the line to trip. The stays are galvanised steel rods and are 24mm in diameter. Upon inspection, Eskom found no sign of corrosion or metal fatigue on the stays, signalling clear evidence of sabotage when the stays were cut, de Ruyter said on Friday.
“What further arouses suspicion was that there is a deliberate act of sabotage was that nothing was stolen from the site. The stays were cut and the tower was pushed over … this was not an economic crime and this was an act of sabotage,” he said.
“The consequences of this happening are quite significant. This means that if we had lost power supply to those conveyor belts feeding coal to Lethabo, we would’ve run out of coal within six hours… This would’ve caused us to lose our most reliable unit (the loss of 3,600MW) and would’ve put us into stage 6 load shedding.”
Over the past month, Eskom has been implementing intermittent load-shedding ranging from stage 1 to stage 4 (where 4,000MW of capacity is taken out the grid to prevent a blackout), citing losses in its generation capacity. On Friday, load-shedding was de-escalated to from stage 2 to stage 1, with no load-shedding forecast for the week ahead.
The power cuts, which the country has had to grapple with for 14 years, are viewed as a risk to SA’s recovery after the economy contracted 6.4% in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The government has previously pointed to sabotage for the power cuts but had not provided evidence. The latest incident, however, is a clear indication of a “deliberate act of sabotage”, De Ruyter said, prompting the power utility to rope in law enforcement.
“The evidence does appear to be prima facie incontrovertible that there is malice at foot and that we need to take action. This is not only a challenge for Eskom: we have state security agencies, we have law enforcement agencies and I would suggest that there is a role to play for those agencies in bringing the perpetrators of these acts to book,” De Ruyter said.
During a daily media briefing last week, Eskom said it had increased surveillance at its power stations to uncover possible acts of negligence or sabotage including the use of drones and intelligent cameras that were able to use artificial intelligence to detect if there were unwarranted activities taking place at the power stations.
However, the power utility has not stationed patrol guards at its pylons at its various power stations as that would be physically impossible, De Ruyter says.
“We have mechanisms in place to avoid a total blackout [with] load-shedding being the primary mechanisms that we use but we can only lose so much capacity … but now we are exposed and there is a need for security agencies and law enforcement agencies to assist Eskom in protecting assets of national importance,” he said.
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