After a recent tour, Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba has said the December 2013 deadline for the Medupi power station in Lephalale, Limpopo, to start delivering power still stands.

“I have no intention of allowing any delays to the target of December 2013,” Gigaba told reporters during a site visit. “I will tolerate no delays – that is why we have brought all the stakeholders on site.”

Gigaba said all concerned parties assured him there would be no further delays.

You know how it is in the cartoon when the road runner bird is being chased and accidentally runs off a cliff? For quite a few steps the bird keeps going in a straight line and then . . . whoooooooo down like a hailstone!

I was outside the front door of Mdupi power station last week and this I can tell you: there is no way that Medupi will generate any power in December. Boiler one is just not there. Boiler two is a few steel columns. The other boilers a bit further advanced.

Boiler six at least has cladding, but there is no connection to the flue stacks or the boiler to the turbine. It’s not going to happen. It will be March 2014, if they’re lucky.

Now, secondly, the Eskom margin last week between electrical demand and supply reached a low of 150 MW. I doubt that you can run a power system that close. And this is before there is snow on the Cape mountains, or the Drakensberg. Gigaba is going to be werry cross, I think, when he will be forced to tolerate delays. Bad power station. Naughty, naughty Eskom.

Back to Medupi. Alstom is still trying to get its boiler software to work. They have presented it twice so far and it didn’t work. On June 18, they advertised a position for a boiler protection system (BPS) engineer, whose duties would be: “Within the engineering teams, responsible for BPS design and coordination, including general specification, hardware design specification, software design specification, software implementation, test procedure and factory acceptance tests and tests implementation.” One hopes this is a coincidence.

It so happens that you and I can buy a “power station in a box”. Specify the fuel supply, the power output and go to tender for a “lump sum, turnkey power station”. Get one contractor to build the whole thing. We don’t and shouldn’t design the whole thing locally with the African National Congress being one of the boiler sub-contractors through its shareholding in Hitachi. While Hitachi has supplied quite a few Eskom boilers the last one was in 2001 which, in control system terms, is ages ago. It will, in the future, be so much simpler for Eskom to just buy a power station from one contractor, fully equipped to deliver on time. Will it happen? No. Hitachi’s political shareholders have too much to lose.

But we can’t go on like this. Eskom has to take some emergency action. I have suggested Eskom get all the municipalities to make a list of the consumers in their areas which can generate from standby power to reduce load. In the Cape, there is about 300 MW of standby generation; in Gauteng, much more and KwaZulu-Natal also much more.

Get the municipalities to sign contracts with all those willing to synchronise and generate into the grid on demand. Then, when Medupi is not on line, get those contracts to be activated during a few peak hours each day, by text message or email. This suggestion has been ignored.

Now, in the 1970’s, South Africa ran out of fuel. The government asked everybody to use less fuel by driving no more than 80 km/h. It worked. Eskom should intensify its radio and television campaign to get people to use less electricity.

During the recent “Earth Hour” when South Africans were asked to reduce their electrical load for one hour Eskom said in a statement that this “achieved a massive 629 MW average reduction on their electricity usage”.

Is this not the time for an “Earth Month”? Holding thumbs just won’t work. But, in a schadenfreude way, it’s fascinating to see what happens next.