The company depends upon coal for 90% of its power generation requirements.
Eskom plans to replace old plants, which it will start decomissioning from 2025, with more efficient technologies to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, now at 230 million tonnes.
“You will be seeing the timing of big renewables, the timing of nuclear, you will be seeing more certainty on underground coal gasification … first quarter next year you will see a lot of things come together,” Eskom’s Corporate Services Managing Director Steve Lennon said.
Lennon said that Eskom was designing a 42 MW pilot plant to test a technology to gasify deep coal deposits underground and feed the gas into a combined cycle gas turbine. It then plans to scale up the project to a 2,100 MW plant.
“A full-scale (2,100 MW) plant, everything going well, could be running around 2015-16,” Lennon said.
Eskom also bets on the country’s solar thermal potential, which Lennon said was in the tens of thousands of MW.
“We anticipate that over the next 18 months that project will proceed … we expect some progress on the CTF decision in the first quarter of next year,” Lennon said.
“We’ve got the site, we’ve got all the approvals … Within 18 months (the wind farm) could be built,” Lennon said.
The farm may be scaled up to 200 MW, but Lennon said the company was not betting on wind as a major contributor to its power grid owing to its inconsistency.
