Johannesburg: India will provide South African parastatal electricity supplier Eskom with a Powerplant Control Room simulator to train locals in Eskom’s plans to renew and repurpose its power stations across the country, an official has said. The announcement was made on Friday after representatives of a dozen Indian energy companies met Eskom executives on the sidelines of the Urja Matla Energy Conference.
The conference was hosted by the Indian Consulate General and the Wits Business School.
Harish Kumar, Commercial Representative and Head of Chancery at the Indian Consulate in Johannesburg, said at the meeting that India was ready to help Eskom in renovation and modernisation, equipping them with efficient systems through supercritical and ultra supercritical sets, emission control, and latest technologies in transmission and distribution.
“Also, we would be willing to provide a simulator of Powerplant Control Room to train the local manpower of Eskom in the operation of power plants. This simulator can be housed in Wits Business School, where the National Power Training Institute (NPTI)and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) will train the trainers, which is as per the MoU inked between NTPC and Eskom,” Kumar said.
He added that the housing would be done as soon as Eskom confirmed the required rating of the Powerplant Simulator. The consulate earlier helped facilitate an MoU signed between NTPC and Eskom.
Radhakrishnan Sarangapani, Executive Director at NTPC, explained what the MoU entails.
“We started negotiations when the original Eskom team visited our plant. When they came back, they also implemented practices and decided that we should carry these practices forward with a framework of an agreement.
“The idea is mutual cooperation and helping South African plants increase their efficiency through the expertise of NTPC. South Africa also has expertise about the equipment they have at their power plants which could also be useful to NTPC also,” Sarangapani said.
He added that NTPC has a bouquet of services which could definitely be under the terms of this MoU.
The NTCP team visited a plant of Eskom before returning to India to decide on the specific areas of cooperation.
“The elements of the MoU are basically to set up mutual cooperation with the power plants of Eskom in the areas of renovation and modernisation of the plants in terms of services. Also, there will be joint collaboration on renewable energy,” Eskom CEO Dan Marokane told PTI.
“NTPC and Eskom are both state utilities with vast, big, many years of operational experience. We can learn between the two of us and what we’ve got to do is collaborate to improve our performances as a utility,” Marokane said.
He also said that the global shift away from coal-fired power stations was also an issue that the two countries would address together.
“Reducing emissions is a responsible thing to do, but we want to explore technologies for allowing us to use coal for longer in a responsible manner. India has also been running coal operations for many years and I think if we come together, we can really make some magic in terms of performance on both sides,” Marokane said.
Earlier at the conference, NPTI and the Africa Energy Leadership Centre at the Wits Business School agreed to ink an MoU for cooperation to augment skilling of youth in the power sector, focusing on renewable energy, data analytics, transmission and distribution.
Eskom’s medium-term plans to involve the communities around the power stations in a variety of green energy projects, including agriculture, and producing bricks from the mountains of ash that are waste products at the coal-fired stations.
