Kusile Power Station

Overview

Spoormaker & Partners was the mechanical engineer for Kusile Power Station, a six-unit, 4,800MW coal-fired power station for Eskom near Witbank/eMalahleni, delivered as part of a consortium led by Nyeleti and Black & Veatch. Design work began in 2008 and the HVAC installation was substantially complete by around 2020, covering 65 buildings — mainly substations and process-support facilities — with a combined floor area of roughly 139,000 m².

The Challenge

The HVAC scope spanned 65 separate buildings, most of them electrical substations requiring standby chillers, pumps and ventilation, including a number of battery rooms where Ex-rated equipment and increased ventilation rates were needed to mitigate explosion risk. Working inside a large multi-disciplinary consortium also meant every HVAC component had to be coded and tagged using the KKS system — the standardised alphanumeric identification system used globally across power stations — so equipment could be consistently tracked and monitored plant-wide.

Our Solution

Spoormaker designed chilled-water systems for the majority of the 65 buildings, feeding roughly 10.4km of chilled-water piping and around 16MW of installed cooling capacity, all monitored through a station-wide Building Management System from the central control room in the Aux Bay building. The completed HVAC installation was valued at approximately R0.5 billion (2020). Kusile was among the first Eskom power stations, alongside Medupi, to provide full cooling to all its substations to prolong the life of electrical switchgear and electronic components, and is one of the largest air-cooled coal-fired power stations in the world.