Minister Lynne Brown and Medupi project manager Roman Crookes on site at Medupi

In September 2014, the Medupi project team and the minister of Public Enterprises, Lynne Brown, had committed Eskom to synchronisation of Unit 6, the first unit to be synchronised to the grid, by 24 December 2014, and Eskom has been conducting a well-publicised 100 day count-down to this date.

Being just one of the milestones along the way to handover of the first unit at Medupi to Eskom Generation for commercial use some six months later, the exact date of this synchronisation is largely symbolic, and Eskom was at pains to point out the significant progress being made in the commissioning of this unit.

However any delays beyond 24 December 2014 will prove to be damaging to Eskom's reputation and credibility, and the project team is exploring interventions to minimise the critical path of the commissioning timeline to first synchronisation, which currently extends to mid-January 2015.

The briefing advising of possible delays in the first synchroniation of Unit 6 at Medupi follows repeated earlier broken progress commitments by Eskom to its shareholder representative and the public, and comes at a time when the utility is conducting mandatory country-wide rotating load-shedding resulting directly and indirectly from the delays in the completion of Medupi and Kusile... (more)

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