Eskom customer service operations GM Marion Hughes on Thursday highlighted the many achievements of the power utility in the past year, including the fact that it has not had the need to load-shed for a year.

Speaking at the yearly South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry convention, she added that, in the first six months of its 2016/17 financial year, Eskom achieved 101 067 electricity connections. “We are well on our way to 800 000 connections in the next three years,” she noted.

Meanwhile, Hughes pointed out that the Ingula pumped storage scheme – the largest of its kind in Africa – was on track for the fourth unit to be brought into operation.

The Ingula project won two awards at the Annual South African Institute of Civil Engineering (Saice) & South African Forum of Civil Engineering Contractors (Safcec) Awards earlier this month.

The first was the Most Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award in the Technical Excellence Projects Category and the second the Technical Excellence Achievement Award.

The awards are held yearly to honour individuals, projects of excellence, community-oriented initiatives, as well as various institutional departments of Saice and Safcec.

Another key objective of the awards is to give recognition to well-engineered civils projects.

The multibillion-rand Ingula project, situated in Ladysmith and straddling the KwaZulu-Natal and Free State provinces, is a peaking hydropower station comprising an upper and lower reservoir separated in elevation by 480 m and within the Little Drakensberg mountain range.

This project, involving Gibb, Royal Haskoning DHV and Knight Piésold as the consulting engineers, has already contributed to stabilising the South African power system.

When completed, it will have four 333 MW Francis-type pumps or turbines and motor generators in its underground powerhouse complex, 116 storeys underground.