What happens to the people who work at a coal power station when it is decommissioned and repurposed for renewable energy? They throw themselves into learning a whole new range of skills.
When Komati Power Station’s unit nine fell silent in October 2022 no glasses were raised and nothing was said to mark the moment.
Emotions ran high that day, recalls the acting general manager of the plant, Thevan Pillay.
In its heyday Komati burned through 12,000 tonnes of coal a day and fed 1,000MW of electricity into the national grid. Built half a century ago, the station sits in the heart of South Africa’s power belt, which cuts through a swath of central Mpumalanga province.
Now Komati has reached the end of its life and is going through a decommissioning process. Many of Eskom’s staff moved to other power stations. For the communities surrounding the station, its closure was hard felt especially for those who relied on the plant directly or indirectly for work.
But the power station isn’t dead yet.
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In the shadow of its giant cooling towers some of the employees who tearfully watched generation unit nine’s shut down are now part of a workforce that provide a peek into a future where coal is no longer king and old power stations take their place in a low-carbon economy.
They are trying their hand at new projects, some of which are totally left field of traditional coal-fired energy production. One even involves farming fish.
‘We are learning as we go along,’ admits Jenny Prinsloo, who leads the aquaponics project. ’None of us knew a lot about this.’
She explains how it all works. ‘So the tilapia do their business in the water, then it moves through the filter system, then is used to fertilise the plants and is pumped back into the tanks for the fish.’
Prinsloo’s job at the power station is risk management and she admits she has never grown vegetables before.
The closed system is powered by solar panels.
Bheki Nkabinde, a community volunteer attached to the programme, is experimenting on what vegetables fare best on this part of the Highveld. ‘So far that is the lettuce,’ he says.
The plan is to expand the project and, when it is up and running, hand it over to the local community. Small businesses will run different components from the growing of the vegetables to the fish farming.
Other projects happening at the power plant are more in line with power generation.
Banks of photovoltaic panels that will occupy land around the power plant are being assembled and built. Together with this will be 150MW of battery energy storage.
Mazz Scott and Shoki Mbowane once worked in the station’s coal department, now they have signed up for the construction reskilling programme. They are learning to install PV panels.
‘After training we will be able to install them on our roofs ourselves,’ laughs Mbowane. Both are enjoying learning new skills, but for Scott there is still a hint of nostalgia for the old days of just two and a half years ago. Even those times when she had to rush to the station in the middle of the night after one of the units had tripped.
Not far from where those silent generating units now stand, is an assembly line of mini power stations that, true to the just energy transition, is bringing green electricity to the most remote parts of South Africa.
These power units are containerised micro grids that contain lithium batteries that are charged by solar panels. Eskom is using them to electrify hard to reach communities.
At Swartkopdam, an off-the-grid settlement 150km from Upington in the Northern Cape, a micro grid provides electricity to 39 houses.
Plugging the community into the national grid through transmission lines running hundreds of kilometres would have cost in excess of a quarter of a billion rand.
‘We are looking at different applications where we could make them bigger or smaller,’ explains Pillay.
In the future other projects might be rolled out to test if they will work. There has been the suggestion of growing hemp in the lands surrounding the station and another idea is to turn Komati into a museum where visitors can see an old power station up close.
What works might be rolled out to other sites as coal powered stations across the power belt close as they reach their end of life.
The repurposing project at Komati started too late, the Presidential Climate Commission found in a report on Komati in 2023. The decommissioning process started before Eskom established a Just Energy Transition office in 2020 and before the government adopted the Just Transition Framework in 2022.
A process like this will ideally need to be planned for about eight years, Pillay told a group of journalists in February. Komati did not have that luxury.
Despite the shortcomings, the commission’s report noted that “there is enough agency and will in and around Komati to see real progress in the future, at an imaginable scale.”
‘Komati is going to be the flagship and as it has always been we will be the guinea pigs,’ says Pillay.