<article><p class="lead">South African state utility Eskom has put a contingency plan in place ahead of tropical storm Eloise, which is expected to hit the eastern and northern parts of the country at the weekend.</p><p>Eskom has assessed the risks and possible impact of the storm on its infrastructure and electricity supply. "Our teams are on standby to do everything possible to mitigate these risks," it said.</p><p>The storm will hit parts of Mpumalanga, where most of Eskom's power plants are. It may also reach Lephalale, where the newly built 4.8MW Medupi power plant is, as well as its 4MW Matimba facility.</p><p>These power plants have been alerted and have begun making preparations to implement "wet coal" contingency plans, Eskom said.</p><p>Heavy rainfall for four days or less does not pose a significant threat to power plant operations, but continuous heavy rainfall for more than four days hampers coal handling at the power plants and the mines supplying them.</p><p>There are also some power plants in the Mpumalanga area that have been experiencing ash dam constraints, Eskom said. Continuous heavy rainfall could hamper operations at these power plants, so recovery efforts are already underway, it said.</p><p>The storm will cross transmission lines that import around 1GW of power into South Africa from the Cahora Bassa dam in Mozambique. "While these lines and towers were reinforced a few years back after flooding downed towers, the two lines remain vulnerable during a tropical storm such as Eloise," Eskom said.</p><p>The firm has assigned extra staff to attend to faults as quickly as possible.</p><p>The utility is also working closely with the national disaster management centre, the provincial disaster management centres in Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Kwa-Zulu Natal, and local government authorities to ensure minimal disruption of supply to customers. </p><p>The utility asked the public to use electricity sparingly during the storm to avoid unnecessary pressure on the system.</p><p>South Africa's power system is already severely restrained owing to Eskom's aging coal-fired power fleet, which forces the utility to implement regular rolling blackouts because of outages.</p><p>Despite collapsing domestic demand and curtailed supply-side activity amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Eskom implemented record load-shedding in 2020, with more than 1,600GWh of power generation taken off line.</p><p class="bylines">Elaine Mills</p></article>
