Track: Reliability and Maintenance

Abstract

The reliability of power supply by South African coal-fired power plants has become the central focus of many areas of governments’ strategic planning. The reason for this is its poor maintenance, unplanned outages, increased generator trips and lack of adequate skills. The impact of the above shortcomings is increased load shedding, insufficient electricity in the country, high cable theft, low production in manufacturing industries and insufficient photovoltaic energy produced in grid-tie system configurations. Thus, this work tends to demonstrate the need for improving the existing coal power plants to increase the amount of solar energy in the national grid. The historical data was collected from plant failures, generator asset management, maintenance strategies and unplanned capability loss factors. This data was analyzed through qualitative and quantitative research methods. The results obtained from the proposed methodology show that inadequate training of employees, skills shortages, unavailability of quality spares, and lack of maintenance are some of the major contributing factors to plant breakdowns and failures. Furthermore, research has revealed that a preventative maintenance strategy is the most recommended strategy to improve generator plant reliability instead of a corrective maintenance strategy that is currently used and found to be ineffective and inappropriate.