The South African energy sector needs to improve the efficiency of its maintenance planning to complete power plant maintenance faster, thereby, alleviating the pressure on supply and stabilising energy supply to attract more investment in South Africa.

This is according to plant engineering and consulting company Carab Tekniva engineering manager Erik van der Linde, who says the South African electric power industry will remain under pressure until new generation capacity comes on line. In the meantime, South Africa can only maintain existing infrastructure as effec- tively as possible.

To promote effective maintenance, Carab Tekniva developed plant care software modules over the last ten years. These modules are used in the power generating industry to capture inspection and repair history on power plants and especially on boiler plants.

The software enables personnel to evaluate high-risk areas that need attention and critical maintenance. These modules allow the capturing of inspection results and issue the subsequent repair scope through engineering personnel involvement. Once issued, the repair scope is tracked every step of the way with the new welding module.

Carab Tekniva has also recently integrated wireless technology, U-Fi (universal serial bus over wireless fidelity) with the plant care modules.

The U-Fi technology links the test and inspection equipment with a tablet device to record measurements electronically during the inspection process, thereby eliminating intermediate paper templates.

This eliminates the manual capturing of data, which reduces errors and enables high-quality inspection results to be ready for evaluation by engineering staff in a shorter time.

Plants can, therefore, be maintained more effectively and can continue to ope- rate efficiently over an extended plant life cycle.

“We have recently completed a testing phase with our new technology and are starting to roll it out to clients,” says Van der Linde, who believes that wireless technology will soon gain popularity in the power industry.

Meanwhile, he emphasises that, apart from new technologies, structured planning is also vital in efficient maintenance.

“With a structured maintenance plan in place, it is easier to plan better for an outage before it takes place. By analysing the inspection and repair history stored in the plant care modules, the outage scope can be predicted with greater accuracy in terms of resource and budget requirements. This ensures that planning for out- ages can be done in ever- growing detail, as the quality of the information contained in the plant care modules improves over time. Better prediction and planning lead to faster execution,” Van der Linde adds.

He says the biggest potential for growth in the local energy industry lies in better maintaining existing infrastructure while further diversifying South Africa’s electricity supply, adding that renewable energy and nuclear power will play a significant role in diversification.

More independent power producers also need to be engaged and a better environment needs to be created for them to come on line. This will assist in building the country’s economy,” says Van der Linde.

He believes the industry will remain under pressure for a while longer, even if new gene- rating capacity comes on line.

Power plant equipment needs to be switched off to perform maintenance and this cannot be done when all available capacity is required to generate electricity.

“The plants need to run for as long as possible as a result, thus placing even more pressure on infrastructure and the maintenance thereof,” Van der Linde explains.

While government is building new capacity in the form of State-owned power utility Eskom’s Medupi and Kusile power stations, in Limpopo and Mpumalanga respectively, this generation capacity is needed as quickly as possible to alleviate the pressure on the country’s existing infrastructure, he notes.

Van der Linde adds that, as far as South African industries are concerned, they need to be more energy efficient, as the cost of energy is increasing and those in the various indus- tries need to be more econo- mical with energy use. Increasing plant efficiency is increasingly becoming an industry requirement.

It is, however, challenging to increase plant efficiency, as it usually requires a multi- faceted approach. Plants can rarely justify huge capital outlay for more efficient equipment and rather revert to performing energy optimisation studies to pinpoint the energy losses and associated costs that can be dealt with easily with maximum impact.

The Carab Tekniva group offers consultation services in energy efficiency improvement through performance measurement, design and plant modification. For example, energy recovery heat exchangers provide a simple solution to meet plant requirements for increased efficiency, says Van der Linde.