Morupule B shines after 10-year storm
Mbongeni Mguni | Tuesday September 20, 2022 09:27
Three years ago, the Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) invited media to its troubled 600MW Morupule B power station outside Palapye for the installation of a major component.
The exercise was said to demonstrate the start of extensive remedial works expected to cost $120 million (P1.2 billion at 2019 rates).
For the past 1,100 days or more, dating back to June 2019, critical work has been going on silently at the troubled Morupule B power plant. Unit 4, one of four at the 600MW plant, has been undergoing an intensive overhaul as part of the remedial works planned for the entire power station.
The overhaul is being done according to the BPC’s specifications, overseen by its independent engineering consultants and paid for by CNEEC, the Chinese contractor who built Morupule B between 2009 and 2012.
Unit 4 was successfully commissioned and tested in June this year and is due to end its 90 day trial run this month, before being handed over to the BPC in October.
From there, according to the BPC’s plans seen by Mmegi, each of the other three units will be taken down and similar overhauls done, starting with Unit 2 next month. Each overhaul is expected to last 354 days, meaning the entire remedial works are due complete in January 2025.
“Those who built the plant handed it to us in not good shape,” Minerals and Energy minister, Lefoko Moagi recently told state television.
“We said fix it and give it back to us and we had our owner’s engineer making sure the job is done properly. “This started in 2019 but COVID-19 came meaning delays in some of the parts and challenges in travelling for the experts.
“Unit 4 has been done and it has been giving us 150MW which makes us hopeful that the others will also be done properly as they have seen how to make it work.”
The latest developments are a far cry from the power station’s darkest days, when equipment and construction defects in key parts of the plant caused frequent breakdowns and loadshedding for households and businesses between 2012 and 2015.
Moagi description of the troubles at Morupule B and the state of the current overhaul belie the national panic and disruption caused by the faults at the power station. Morupule B was supposed to be the country’s main source of electricity, but from the start, red flags were being raised about the contractor, the material being used for key components and the design.
The World Bank, which pumped $136 million into the project, released a damning evaluation report in 2016 stating that the contractor should never have qualified to be given the project, that the BPC put far too few staff on the ground on site and did not properly supervise the work, among others.
Subsequent evaluations by the BPC confirmed “unreliable and defective major boiler components,” equipment and materials that lie at the heart of the plant’s operations and without which darkness prevails. Key issues that afflicted Morupule B were around the Fluidised Bed Heat Exchangers (FBHE) and the boilers, the latter plagued by the fact that they could not expand, and that the insulation and refraction was substandard.
The cost to consumers and business in terms of loadshedding during 2012 and 2015 is probably incalculable, but as at 2016, government estimated that it had spent P11 billion in building Morupule B and its associated works such as the transmission line, making it one of the country’s single biggest investments in public infrastructure.
While the final direct costs to taxpayers of building Morupule B remain unclear, the plant’s expenses and the fact that loans made for its construction came due while full generation had yet to be achieved, pushed government to consider cutting its losses and selling the plant.
In fact, government spent three years to 2018 working out a deal to sell the plant to China Machinery Engineering Corporation, a China state-owned company related to Morupule B’s original contractor. The deal floundered over the sale price.
“The response was not good; the price was wrong and it was not attractive given the money we had spent,” insiders told Mmegi at the time.
The cost of building Morupule B can also be counted in human terms. The plant was set up at breakneck speed in order to avoid the scheduled reduction in supplies by South Africa and five workers lost their lives with others injured during construction.
Moagi’s comments also belie the near two-year period spent with haggling and headbutting over the remedial works between the BPC and the original contractor. Stalemates developed and breakthroughs eventually reached over the design and construction of replacement components, governance on the site and other details. For the overhaul, CNEEC reportedly insisted on its designs and construction, but the BPC and its army of advisers prevailed with their preferred designs and insistence on supervising construction and installation.
CNEEC also reportedly wanted to shut down the entire plant and do the remedial work, then start it up again, which would have been a cheaper option for them. The BPC however prevailed in its insistence that each unit be taken down and revamped for a year, tested under a three-month trial period before being put back online.
With the successful completion and testing of Unit 4, the BPC is feeling vindicated in its approach. The remedial works, although limited to one unit so far, have already borne results in terms of output at Morupule B.
“Between April 2021 and January 2022, the plant was operating far below target which meant very high imports of electricity for the country,” BPC general manager for generation, Edward Rugoyi told a recent public meeting on power tariffs.
“However, because of the interventions we have done, from November 2021, production has improved a lot and from February, we have been operating above the generation targets.
“We are continuing with more measures to make the reliability and stability of Morupule b to be at a level of industry best practice.”
According to figures seen by Mmegi, plant availability at Morupule B improved to 67% in the first quarter of the 2022-2023 financial year from 31% in the corresponding period last year.
Combined with power from its sister plant, the 132MW Morupule A power station, Morupule B took the country through winter, where national demand peaked at around 600MW, compared to an off-peak of about 370MW.
Any blackouts that occurred were the result of localised faults and not planned loadshedding, BPC officials say.
The improved generation has also allowed the BPC to consider exports into the region, with reports of a deal in the works with Eskom of South Africa which will be supplied during local off-peak periods.
Those in charge of the knobs and levers at Morupule B believe that after ten years of headaches, the storm is over at Morupule B. What remains is to replicate the success at Unit 4 at the other units and capacitate Batswana to take over full running of the plant.
However, given its troubled past, whether the remedial works proceed seamlessly until the final handover in January 2025 is anyone guess.