The new boss of South Africa’s best-performing power station says experienced staff, “walking the plant” regularly and a zero tolerance for mess are the ingredients for success.
Karabo Rakgolela’s proficiency is rooted in years of experience and a loyalty to Eskom that goes back 30 years (he calls himself an “Eskomite”). He started as a trainee at Hendrina power station, where he worked his way up to general manager.
He is in charge of Lethabo power station, between Vanderbijlpark and Sasolburg in the Free State, which has consistently outperformed others in the fleet.
Rakgolela’s station is able to produce the most electricity over a certain period, earning itself the label “best-performing coal-fired power station for 2023”. Its energy availability factor is 74%, compared with a 51% aggregate of the rest of the coal-powered fleet, according to Eskom.
The older guys will tell you: ‘You walk your plant, learn to know your plant and listen when your plant is talking to you’
He was cluster manager for Lethabo, Matla, Kusile, Kendal and Grootvlei power stations before taking up the role of general manager at Lethabo this week.
“Officially, I have already been at Lethabo for the past four years. I am not a new broom, I am the same broom,” the 54-year-old laughs.
The 33-year-old power station has six 618MW units for a total installed capacity of 3,708MW. It employs 720 staff.
The secret to his successes at Eskom? A strict mom, experience working at different power stations and many, many hours of “walking the plant”.
Growing up in Ga-Rankuwa, Pretoria, his first management training started at home before he went to study electrical engineering at a technikon in Durban.
“I had a very strict mom who made sure you cleaned up behind you. I took that with me on my journey. If you walk around at Lethabo or any other power station in my cluster, you will not find pieces of paper, empty cans or other rubbish lying around.
“You can’t say this plant is going to operate well if it is not in good condition.
“One of Lethabo’s main advantages is that we have a dedicated mine. It makes it much easier to deal with predictability. You know you are getting your coal from only one source.
“If the quality turns, the mine will warn you and say: ‘Listen, we have hit an area where the coal is not so good.’ Then you know how to adjust your parameters to accommodate it.”
It also closes the door to opportunities for criminals.
“We have had little to no incidents, like the swapping of coal for inferior products we hear about from Mpumalanga,” Rakgolela said.
“We’ve got a robust plant. We can burn coal with an ash content between 38% and 40%. This station was designed well. If you feed it what you need to feed it and you maintain what needs to be maintained, it will give you what you want.”
But infrastructure alone won’t do the job.
“Another key to our success is the wealth of experience in our employee ranks. That gives the station access to institutional memory and informed gut feel — things born of experience.
“The older guys will tell you: ‘You walk your plant, learn to know your plant and listen when your plant is talking to you.’”
Tube leaks used to be one of their biggest challenges.
“We do still suffer tube leaks. You will have heard before of units going down over tube leaks,” Rakgolela said.
“You have something like 600m of tubing in the boiler, depending on the thickness or thinness of the tube as you put steam through them. As you put temperature and steam through the tubes, they can become overpressurised and burst.
“Imagine now you need to find out which one of the 20,000 tubes in the boiler has burst. We shut the unit off, then we need to cool it for 12 to 14 hours. Then scaffolding must go in.
“Our team at Lethabo have close to perfected detecting and fixing tube leaks. Experience is key. An experienced operator can hear there is a burst tube. Nine out of 10 times you will find the burst tube has affected other tubes, so they have to be cut out and replaced.
“Depending on how many tubes are affected, it can take anything from two to 14 days to fix. At Lethabo, we detect the issue early, shut down early and go in early to fix. Two to three days, we are out of there.
“You learn to know your plant by walking the plant. As you walk the plant you get used to certain sounds. The minute you walk past and that sound is different, you need to call stop and investigate.”
He remembers an incident during his time as the general manager at Hendrina.
“The holding nuts on one of the turbines were loose. People walked past without noticing, so I called the guys over and said: ‘Listen to the vibrations, do you hear something different?’
I said to them: ‘No, my job is very simple. It is to send megawatts. I need one screen. A screen must tell me how many megawatts I am sending right now’
— Karabo Rakgolela, general manager of Lethabo power station
“When they stopped that unit and investigated, they found that the retaining ring was loose. If that thing came loose at 3,000rpm in that big shaft …”
Rakgolela shakes his head. “I don’t even want to think about it. There have been similar incidents at Duvha and Medupi, for instance. It can take a unit out for some time.”
Sitting in his office, he points towards a solitary computer screen on a bookshelf.
“When I got to Lethabo in 2019 there were lots of screens and engineering stations in this office. I asked them what those were for and they said: ‘You can monitor the entire plant from here.’
“I said to them: ‘No, my job is very simple. It is to send megawatts. I need one screen. A screen must tell me how many megawatts I am sending right now.’”
He remains confident the load-shedding situation will have improved by next year.
“I am willing to bet you a steak dinner that we will have little to no load-shedding by Christmas, and after that we will not easily go above stage 4.”
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