It is the first large scale Electricity storage facility in the Republic of South Africa and on the continent as a whole. Indeed we are seeing a growing wave of such developments in various corners of the world map.

Construction will take between seven and twelve months and the batteries
on the site will be charged from the main grid via Eskom’s Elandskop
substation. The facility will have a capacity of 8 MW, equivalent to 32
MWh of distributed electricity, enough to power a town such as Howick
for four hours. Among the notable benefits of the BESS is that it will
boost the network during peak hours, thereby reducing the strain on the
network during peak hours.

That’s not good enough.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/darth_nadoma:

It is the first large scale Electricity storage facility in the Republic of South Africa and on the continent as a whole. Indeed we are seeing a growing wave of such developments in various corners of the world map.

Construction will take between seven and twelve months and the batteries
on the site will be charged from the main grid via Eskom’s Elandskop
substation. The facility will have a capacity of 8 MW, equivalent to 32
MWh of distributed electricity, enough to power a town such as Howick
for four hours. Among the notable benefits of the BESS is that it will
boost the network during peak hours, thereby reducing the strain on the
network during peak hours.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/ziqhbx/south_africas_eskom_starts_construction_of_its/izs2c4o/

So... don't bother doing it? What's your point

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I imagine this is too little too late for many South Africans and this is still, frustratingly slow. Loadshedding, or controlled blackouts, have been and on-again off-again part of South African life since 2008, and not enough has been done to update and modernize the grid since then - in recent weeks it’s gotten to the point that many cities are regularly without electricity for 9 hours or more a day. This, on top of everything else, has devastated the economy, made it impossible for students to study, destroyed infrastructure and personal belongings because of the constant surges from the power going off and then coming back on multiple times a day, and widened the existing gap in society between those who can afford generators and batteries and continue to function, and those who can’t. I agree the comment doesn’t add anything to the conversation, just voicing why people are frustrated.

They're massively in debt, they can't keep any power stations functioning, it takes them 10 years to build new power stations that end up basically exploding the moment they turn them on.

South Africans don't want new batteries, they want a functioning electrical grid

Seven to twelve months? Cool, can't wait to hear how "it's almost done" six years from now

Saffa Here. I can bet that money will be trimmed off the top and that the tenders awarded will be to companies with connections to politicians.

I worked in construction for 6 years at one of the biggest companies here, the corruption is rife. Any project is about lining pockets, not about providing a service.

Cool that they are doing it, but they could do more and achieve a higher level of quality if there were less fuckers scooping funds for themselves.

So building infrastructure which helps the grid during peak use times is bad then, eh?

Some people just gotta bitch about everything.

We have tons of coal ready to be burnt.

Just do maintenance on existing power stations, and keep the lights on.

Now we have to wait a year for a battery centre that can only power 2/10 of our biggest city. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to me

All while coal is sitting in a mine and not being put to use.

They’re gonna spend millions building this new thing when we could’ve just done proper maintenance on medupi, kusile and koeberg

The other issue is I've yet to see an example where batteries are good at the industrial level. They are generally too expensive and short lived to overcome the expense as opposed to battery-like technology like pumping water uphill when you have excess and letting it run turbines on the way down.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2021-07-26/pumped-hydro

Well we’re suffering from outages RIGHT NOW.

7-12 months to build this station is laughable, whoever wrote that article doesn’t know South Africa. It’ll probably take 2 years, generate half the amount for electricity said to be generated, AND THEN baaam! Something goes wrong, then there’s a scandal

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Yeah, how dare I bitch about being without power for 6-8 hours a day, every day.

Some people just have to tell others to get over situations they have no clue about.

What coal are you talking about? We only use 15% of 57 million tons of coal we extract, the rest is exported.

Don't make up stuff bra. Everyone in South Africa are energy experts now.

You mean the 20 year extention program for Koeberg is not proper maintenance?

Medupi and Kusile are brand new, their problems are not maintenance. It's design flaws and missmangment

Storage won't help as long as we are short on base load, this could help reduce the amount of diesel we burn for peaking though.

8MW? Thats pathetic. We need 500 of these to solve stage 4 and we need them yesterday.

I mean if it was properly maintained we wouldn’t have electricity problems.

Now imagine the design flaws of this battery centre. We’re causing new problems when we could just fix existing problems

Koeberg? It's been the most reliable powerstaion we have and has reached end of life. And now needs an extention.

Just stop, you don't know what you are talking about.

It's ironic that you name the three powerstaions in our whole grid that don't have maintenance issues. (other issues yes)

You don't understand the scale of a power station. Madupi is the 4764 MW making it one of the largest coal stations in the world. It is also the largest dry cooled power station in the world making even more complex. Its difficult to get right even with no corruption.

This storage mentioned in the article is only 8MW. Comparably much simpler.

We need maintenance on our plants yes, but its too late for most. We need large base load capacity. More power stations coal, gas, nuclear, solar, hidro, wind everthing we can find. We need large scale stograge GW not MW, to remove dependance on diesel for peaking.

Most of the power stations in the fleet (not the ones you mentioned) will be end of life soon. All the maintenance in the world won't change that.

Something to note. It is the first grid scale Battery electricity storage facility in South Africa. But it is not the first electricity storage facility. We already have pumped hydro storage.

Tesla has a few things to tell you my friend...

After it's built, it will be stolen for scrap metal

...and needing few more hundred million rands to complete because of reasons. I want to be wrong on this.

Hahahahhhahaha, can’t even fix their load shedding and they’re adding more complexity?

Some of those people look like they have never touched a shovel before. And why does one get a pointy one?

A picture full of people who have probably never actually used a shovel.

> So building infrastructure which helps the grid during peak use times is bad then, eh?

yeah if you cant maintain your current infrastructure, dont build new ones.

I genuinly hope this works out. South africa largly suffers 4 hours daily outages and it is terrible. Eskom has proven to be corrupt plenty of times although i believe there is a new CEO, which may mean this project's money wont be stolen by officials...

Our government create these projects for the sole purpose of stealing.

Will take 25 years to complete and will be 26,000% over budget

Questioning the future of this project considering 4 of the 5 are using flat shovels instead of spades.