Much of South Africa’s power generation fleet will be obsolete within the ten years, Alstom Power Systems global president Philippe Joubert warned during a presentation in Johannesburg on Tuesday. But he also argued that, while this reality posed material investment-related risks, particularly for Eskom, it also created an opportunity for the country to align its fossil-heavy generation system to the rigours of a world that was growing increasingly intolerant of dirty energy.

Speaking during a breakfast briefing organised by the French South African Chamber of Commerce, Joubert said that technologies were emerging that would enable South Africa to continue to exploit coal, but in a far more efficient and environmentally-acceptable way.

For that reason, the group – which has a large installed base in South Africa, and has been selected by Eskom to supply turbines to the Medupi and Kusile power projects, which will together add 9 480 MW by 2017 – was paying attention to both the R343-billion new build programme, as well as the replacement and retrofit market.

In fact, Joubert indicated the company was canvassing specific retrofit options with Eskom, which would enable the utility to expand existing power plants, while dramatically improving operational efficiencies and reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.

A project was already under way at Eskom’s Arnot power station, where Alstom was assisting to raise the capacity of the plant’s six units from 360 MW to 400 MW, while reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by 60%.

The plant’s coal-burning efficiency would also rise from around 30%, to closer to 45%, a level that was previously only believed to be feasible on new plants such as Medupi and Kusile. In simple terms, the rise in efficiency means that more energy is extracted from each ton of coal burnt.

“If we could take the whole installed base and raise its efficiency to the same level, we will solve most emissions problems. Hopefully, we will be extending this solution to the whole South African installed base in future,” Joubert enthused.

The company was also increasingly strident in its assertion that carbon capture and storage (CCS) – much maligned by environmental groups, which believe the technology will not be able to live up to its hype – was a feasible technology solution.

Alstom was currently spending a good deal of its research and development budget on CCS, which Joubert said might be commercially available from around 2015. It was pursuing two specific capture solutions, both of which were currently being tested at pilot plants in Europe and the US with capacities of around 30 MW.

But Joubert said that the lack of a coherent legal framework was emerging as a key constraint to those wanting to pursue CCS, and urged governments to prioritise the issue so as to ensure that a framework was in place by the time the technical solutions were ready for commercialisation.

WORLD'S AGEING POWER FLEET
But South Africa was also not alone in needing to make major investments to expand climate-friendly generation, while replacing outmoded capacity.

“The world is entering a period where more than 100 gigaWatts a year will become older than 40 years,” Joubert calculated, adding that, at such an age, life-extension interventions were required or the plants would have to be closed.

This fact, together with growth in emerging markets and the need to pursue cleaner generation platforms, was likely to translate into a yearly market for new generation capacity of around 300 gigaWatts.

Joubert was, therefore, convinced that any spillover from the current economic crisis on the energy market and Alstom’s power business would be short-lived.

He told Engineering News Online in an exclusive interview following the presentation that its order book also remained at record levels and intact.

In early November, the global power and transport vendor said that between April 1 and September 30 it had received a record order intake exceeding €15-billion, which was an increase of 20%.

“On the current order book, we have had no repercussions at all,” Joubert added, while acknowledging that there could be some “temporary” project delays in 2009 and 2010 as utilities realigned their short-term plans to the slowdown in demand.

“But the fundamentals of this market remain strong,” he added, estimating the demand for new capacity as standing at between 200 and 250 gigaWatts yearly, without taking into account the need to replace older plant.

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