Mechanical Technology March 2015

⎪ Special report ⎪

Power in southern Africa: a positive outlook

On the occasion of ABB’s annual media briefing, Peter Middleton interviews Leon Viljoen (right), ABB South Africa’s managing director, to find out more about his outlook for ABB, and the power industry in South Africa and across the continent.

O pening ABB’s annual press briefing, southern Africa managing director, Leon Viljoen, says in spite of negative impacts of the mining strike followed by the wage strike by the metalworkers: “We are pleased with our performance in the past year, which was achieved against a very tough trading environment in Southern Africa.” The negative impact was reflected in a R1-billion drop in South African revenue, from R5.9-billion in 2013 to R4.9-billion in 2014. “However, we were still able to grow our base orders by 8.0 %,” Viljoen reveals. “South Africa and a number of the countries in the region where we operate continue to face energy supply challenges, and ABB is well positioned to supply state-of-the-art technology and customised solutions to alleviate the strain on the grid,” he adds. “Eskom is facing breakdowns at power stations on a regular basis,” he continues, “but it is a little unfair to say they have been neglecting maintenance totally. The key reason for the current difficulties is the system is at its limit with respect to capacity, which leaves little time to proactively respond to reduce the risks of sporadic breakdowns,” he explains. ABB has ongoing service contracts with Eskom and is in the process of sign- ing a further equipment upgrade contract. “We don’t see a pull back in terms of maintenance upgrades. In fact, we see the opposite. We are currently executing a substantial contract for replacing motors at power stations, for example. As part of the contract we assessed the remain- ing life of the motors and, based on that assessment, we are replacing motors. We are currently seeing a much greater maintenance focus than we did, say, five years ago,” Viljoen tells MechTech .

Responding to the shortage of mainte- nance skills, Viljoen does not believe that South Africa has serious maintenance capacity issues: “Between Eskom and the service providers to the power industry, servicing capacity is available. We need to do more to overcome skills shortages, though. If you look at the skills base, we have a lot of highly skilled people in the 50 to 60 age group, but below that, there is a generation gap, people did not want to become artisans. We are seeing a shift in attitudes from our younger people, who now recognise that the demand is there and they can see career paths for technically skilled artisans,” he says. “Young people are migrating towards the trades, but it is very important that we act quickly to get these people properly trained and experienced before the older generation leaves the system.” In response, ABB has kicked off a project to build an internationally benchmarked training centre at its head office in Longmeadow. “This ‘Centre of Excellence’ will be an interactive training centre that showcases ABB’s ability to deliver learning solutions to employees and customers as a holistic endeavour,” Viljoen says. Sophisticated learning aids, such as simulators, product cut-outs and demonstration units will be added to ap- peal to the young modern learner. The new facility will deliver learning programmes for all five ABB divisions. The strategy emphasises business involvement and the development of training infrastructure, which will be expanded to offer high, medium and low voltage training.

“Training is the central pillar of the service side of our business. The new programmes will be used to upskill our own staff and for customer training. I have not spoken to one utility that does not require training to upskill their service people, so this is a huge opportunity,” Viljoen says. In response to the adoption of proac- tive/preventative approaches to mainte- nance, Viljoen says that a lot of people have been very sceptical. “Now, though, there is better acceptance. Contracts such as Eskom’s motor replacement project were based on a modern analysis system that can determine the remaining life of an electric motor. People are now much more willing to act and invest, based on predictive techniques such as these, because the cost and conse- quences of unscheduled breakdowns have become obvious,” he notes. “Monitoring is also becoming accepted on remote sites in Africa. More and more customers want to know the status and condition of their equipment at all times, so we are seeing a move to much smarter equipment, even on the distribution side of our business. We have recently installed substations with remote switching and information status capability that gives operators immediate fault alarms and allows circuits to be shut off remotely. These smarter systems are now available

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Mechanical Technology — March 2015