Court slaps Eskom with R1bn bill for Koeberg delays
The Western Cape High Court agreed with the findings of an adjudicator who investigated the delays two and a half years ago, ruling that Eskom was at fault for the work stoppage and had to pay for breaching its contract.
'There is no basis to set aside the decisions of the adjudicator which are valid and binding,' said acting Judge RT Williams.
He ordered the power utility to pay Framatome €35 288 582 (about R728 million at current exchange rates) plus R256.6 million, for a total of R984.6 million. Eskom will likely have to pay well over R1 billion when it factors in interest and Framatome's legal fees.
The dispute centres on the replacement of steam generators at Koeberg, South Africa's sole nuclear power station. Framatome had, in 2018, taken over the contract to supply and install replacement generators at the power plant's two reactor buildings from Areva NP.
Eskom needed to replace the plant's six steam generators - three in each of its two units - to prolong its life by another 20 years.
Eskom scheduled an outage for Koeberg's Unit 2 starting in January 2022 to replace its generators. But in March, it told Framatome it would not be continuing with the steam generator replacement and ordered it to stop work.
Framatome told Eskom that the order to stop work amounted to a 'compensation event' under its contract – meaning it could claim for the disruption. Eskom's project manager agreed, but gave the compensation as nil – meaning Framatome would not be able to claw anything back.
The nuclear company then referred the matter to an adjudicator as provided for in its contract with Eskom.
READ | Eskom scrambles to save R5bn Koeberg project after generator is 'dropped' in China
The adjudicator, advocate Peter Ramsden, had to rule whether the event did, indeed, amount to a compensation event. He had to say what, if anything, Eskom owed Framatome for the abrupt stoppage.
On 15 December 2022, Ramsden ruled the work stoppage order was a compensation event. In March 2023 – a year after Eskom told Framatome to stop work – he fixed what Eskom owed at €35.2 million plus R256.6 million and interest.
Eskom then took the order to court. It argued that adjudicator had taken too long to make a decision, that he had overstepped his authority, that this authority had lapsed, and that he had failed to give detailed reasons for his decision.
Framatome, meanwhile, supported Ramsden's decision.
In a ruling handed down last week, Williams dismissed every one of Eskom's objections, saying Ramsden had done nothing wrong.
'Eskom's challenge to the reasons provided by the adjudicator is clearly a distortion of the quantum decision and a stratagem to avoid having to comply with the adjudicator's decision,' he found.
The steam generators in Unit 2 were eventually replaced during a long‑term outage that began in December 2023. The unit was synchronised to the grid again in December last year.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
28 minutes ago
- Forbes
NRC Eyes New Accident Tolerant Nuclear Fuels For Commercial Use
Part of a nuclear reactor fuel rod element. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has completed a study of advanced, better performing accident tolerant fuels being developed by three U.S. companies as it prepares to handle licensing demand for new commercial nuclear power reactors. Accident tolerant fuels may offer important technological advances to increase the safety of U.S. nuclear power plants. ATFs are being studied to determine their potential to perform better in normal operations and during transportation as well as in nuclear power plant accidents. The NRC's Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research recently released the report prepared by the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The Richland, Wash.-based PNNL is providing technical assistance about the proposed nuclear fuel and new fuel cladding designs that may replace current nuclear fuel rods made with zirconium-based alloys. The 91-page highly technical report is called 'Spent Fuel Storage and Transportation of Accident Tolerant Fuel Concepts' and outlines the latest information on fuel material properties and performance associated with storing and transporting spent nuclear fuel. The federal government is evaluating the performance of nuclear power systems containing ATF. The NRC says the same performance requirements are being sought with irradiated ATF fuel as mandated for conventional zirconium alloy cladded uranium dioxide fuel. The new report explores the current activities of the following companies in their developments with ATFs and fuel cladding designs: The DOE is working on its Advanced Fuels Campaign with teams of researchers seeking new nuclear power plant fuels at five of its national laboratories. The federal collaborations are centered at the PNNL, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Advanced Fuels Campaign national laboratories are located in many regions of the U.S. According to DOE, ATFs offer several advantages over conventional nuclear energy fuel. ATFs are being developed to improve nuclear reactor safety 'by maintaining structural integrity and reactor cooling for a longer duration during severe accident conditions,' DOE says. ATFs The main objective of the Advanced Fuels Campaign is to develop and use ATFs to significantly increase nuclear power performance and safety. Researchers lower a test train into the Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. The NRC report also discussed whether its current regulations would apply to ATF storage and transportation. While it advised companies applying for licenses to provide justification data to support their applications, the NRC noted the federal government's current regulatory framework for storing and transporting spent nuclear fuel would generally cover apply to ATFs. These findings would appear to pave the way for greater interest by companies in turning to nuclear power to meet their energy demands.
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Forbes
7 Business Lessons For AI
From above photo of an anonymous African-American woman analyzing business graph on a laptop ... More computer while sitting at restaurant desk with notebook, pen and eyeglasses. When considering any implementation of AI in a business, leadership teams have a weighty responsibility. This is an approach that people want to get right. They face a few challenges – that the technology is so nascent, that there doesn't seem to be a lot of road maps available for companies, and that many people instinctively distrust large language models to automate processes. So what's to be done? A Leader's Perspective Here's where I recently got some insights from a paper written by Lidiane Jones, who was previously head of Slack, and CEO of Bumble, a major dating platform. Jones breaks down some of the aspects of AI implementation that C-suite people are looking at. Data Transfers and Governance Jones points out that transformations like ETL (extract, transform, load) and ELT (extract, load, transform) predated AI, but data is still siloed in many cases. One solution Jones touts is an 'omnichannel data strategy' – this, she writes, 'will ensure privacy and security of your data, ease of access for business applications, offer real time capabilities and can integrate with your everyday tools.' Compliance with Financial Data Rules For example, Jones speaks about the need to focus on compliance in some areas. 'Every company has critical financial data, subject to audit, regulation and compliance that must be carefully protected,' she writes. 'Normally, for more scaled companies, this data sits on an ERP system. Every CEO, CFO, COO and CRO needs critical real-time insight from these systems, to determine how the business is performing against plans, how expenses are tracking against the budget or how a change in employee investment … will affect the overall cost structure and velocity of the business, among numerous other capital allocation considerations.' Business Intelligence for the Win In terms of general business intelligence, Jones spins a story to illustrate: 'Imagine a Sales Executive who develops a multi-year high trust relationship with one of a company's most important large customer, and she decides to leave the company for a better career opportunity,' she writes. 'Historically, though there will be good information about that customer and notes from this leader, much of her institutional knowledge leaves with her. Corporate human knowledge exists within organizations, and is shaped by the culture, people and business processes.' She then addresses the role of workflow tools and other platform resources. 'Collaboration software of all kinds like Slack, Google Workspace and Teams … have a lot of people's knowledge embedded in them that is hardly ever nurtured,' she adds. 'Unstructured data like this is highly effective in training LLMs, and can provide opportunities that haven't existed before - like capturing the sentiment of what this large customer loved the most about their relationship with this Sales Executive.' She also gave a nod to the potential difficulties, conceding that ' it might feel daunting to expand data strategy planning to be as broad as this,' but notes that partnering with vendors and other firms can help. 'Phasing and prioritizing how you bring more of your data into a single system is key to making progress and capturing business value along the way,' she writes. Agents do the Agenting Jones also makes an important point about the use of AI agents. It goes sort of like this: we're used to computers doing calculations, and digesting and presenting information, but these new systems can actually brainstorm on their own to change processes. 'In many instances, agents can optimize workflows themselves as they determine more effective ways to get the work done,' she writes. A Story of Implementation Citing ChatGPT's meteoric rise, Jones talked about using these technologies in the context of her work at Slack, which is, after all, a business communication tool. She chronicled the firm's connection with companies like OpenAI circa 2017. 'At the time, when I was leading Slack, it was exciting to collaborate with OpenAI, Cohere and Anthropic to use their LLMs to help our customers with some of the most challenging productivity challenges at Slack,' she writes. The challenges she enumerates: 'finding a conversation they knew they had but couldn't remember in what channel, or help customers manage the large amount of messages they received with summaries and prioritization, optimize search for information discovery and so much more.' Then, too, the company created tools. 'We introduced Slack Canvas based templates to help our customers quickly create content based on their corporate information, and captured Huddles' meeting notes and action items, and that was just the beginning,' she explains. 'The capabilities of LLMs gave us the opportunity to solve real-world customer challenges in a pleasant and insightful way, while maintaining the experience of the Slack brand.' Calling this kind of thing the 'table stakes' of the new corporate world, Jones walks us through a lot of the way stations on the path to what she calls 'co-intelligence.' That includes workflow automation, agentic AI, multi-agent systems, and new interfaces. Our AI Brethren Here's one way that Jones characterizes managing an AI: 'Considering autonomous agents as truly 'digital workers' can be a helpful framing for questions we already think of today with 'human workers' like: how does the employer track the quality of the work done? What systems does the digital worker have access to? If the company is audited, how do we track what steps and actions were taken by the digital worker? If the digital worker's actions turn malicious, how do we terminate the agent?' As for the extent of agent autonomy, Jones suggests that fully autonomous agents will be able to handle a complex or 'scoped' job on their own, conceding, though, that 'even an autonomous agent, like a human, needs a job scope and definition - or a set of instructions - on the job at hand.' This new world is one we will have to reckon with soon. Four Principles of Leadership Jones finished with a set of ideas for those who are considering these kinds of deployments. 1. Be hands-on: as a leader, stay close to what's happening 2. This one goes back to prior points: working with vendors and partners is a plus 3. Build an AI-first culture with AI-native projects 4. Find the value for your company I found this to be pretty useful for someone who is contemplating a big move in the age of AI. Some of the best ideas for leadership can be gleaned from TED talks, conferences, and these kinds of personal papers on experience with the industry.
Bloomberg
5 hours ago
- Bloomberg
Nigeria's Aliko Dangote Retires as Chairman of Dangote Cement
Aliko Dangote has retired as chairman and director of Nigeria's Dangote Cement Plc, the company he founded, according to a statement. He will be replaced effective immediately by Emmanuel Ikazoboh, the company statement said, while Mariya Aliko Dangote was appointed to the board.
