Kusile is the Ndebele word for "the dawn has come", which is a lot of poetry for a coal station. The plant sits just outside eMalahleni in Mpumalanga, about 15 km north of Kendal, between the N4 and the N12. Eskom owns it. Six supercritical units of 800 MW each give it a nameplate of 4,800 MW, and since 29 September 2025 every one of those units has been in commercial operation. That date closed a build that started in August 2008 and ran more than a decade late. For years Kusile was a byword for delays, defects and load shedding. It is now one of the stations Eskom points to when it talks about the recovery. Both things can be true at once. Here is the plant as it actually stands in September 2026. _Photo: JMK, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Kusile Power Station from the N4, June 2019._ ## What Kusile actually is Each unit burns bituminous Highveld coal in a supercritical boiler, which runs hotter and at higher pressure than the older Eskom fleet and so squeezes a bit more electricity out of each tonne. The station was designed for a 50-year life, which, if it holds, takes it into the 2060s. Together with Medupi in Limpopo, the other half of Eskom's last big coal build, the two plants can put 9,600 MW on the grid. Kusile is also the first coal station in South Africa, and in Africa, built with wet flue-gas desulphurisation as part of the original design. The kit is meant to strip most of the sulphur dioxide out of the exhaust before it leaves the stack, using limestone and producing gypsum. Medupi was built without it. That difference matters on the Highveld, where coal plants, mines and Sasol sit inside a declared national air-quality priority area. Our air quality explainer covers how bad that airshed actually gets in winter. The coal was always meant to come from the New Largo reserve next door, originally an Anglo American project, later sold to Seriti, and fed in by conveyor rather than a forever convoy of trucks. Construction of the mine lagged the power station, so Kusile spent years on shorter contracts and blending. The plant still sits in the Witbank coalfield. That part of the original plan never really went away. ## How the six units came online Commercial operation is the boring-sounding milestone that actually matters. A unit can be spinning and feeding the grid for months in testing. Until Eskom's Generation division takes it over, that output does not count in the official energy availability figures. Unit 6, for example, first synchronised on 23 March 2025 and only went commercial six months later. Kusile unit dates. First-on-grid is synchronisation; commercial is handover to Generation. Unit| First on the grid| Commercial operation| Capacity ---|---|---|--- 1| March 2017| 30 August 2017| 800 MW 2| July 2017| 29 October 2020| 800 MW 3| April 2019| 31 March 2021| 800 MW 4| 23 December 2021| 31 May 2022| 800 MW 5| 31 December 2023| 30 June 2024| 800 MW 6| 23 March 2025| 29 September 2025| 800 MW The gaps tell the story better than the end date. Unit 1 made commercial operation in 2017. Unit 2 took another three years. By the time Unit 6 closed the set, seventeen years had passed since construction started on a project that was originally sold as a six-year build. ## What it cost, depending on who you ask There are two cost figures in circulation, and they are not measuring the same thing. Eskom's own books, restated on 10 September 2026, put the approved construction budget at R160.5 billion and recorded spend at about R155.5 billion as of 31 July 2026. On that telling, Kusile came in under its approved budget, and the remaining work to 31 July 2028 is ordinary close-out: defects, making-good, balance of plant. It is not, Eskom says, an unfinished power station. Independent estimates that have been around since at least 2019 put the all-in cost nearer R233 billion. Eskom rejects that number and says it has never approved, adopted or published a budget of R233.4 billion. The original 2008-era figure, before years of redesign, labour disruption, contractor fights and corruption, sat around R80 billion. Nobody serious disputes that the project overran that first number by a very long way, or that the State Capture Commission found extensive looting on the site. For a household, the useful question is not which spreadsheet wins. It is that South Africa paid, one way or another, for a 4,800 MW station that arrived late, then spent several more years getting it to run like a station rather than a construction site. ## The 2022 chimney failure On 23 October 2022, while Unit 1 was already off for repairs to a flue-gas desulphurisation pump, a section of its flue-gas duct failed at the horizontal rubber expansion joint and the compensator, the bend that turns exhaust up the chimney and lets the steel grow as it heats. Eskom's own statement is dry about it. The practical result was not. Units 1, 2 and 3 share that west chimney. For a stretch, more than 2,000 MW was missing from the grid, in the worst years of load shedding. The workaround was three temporary steel stacks, built so the boilers could run while the west chimney was repaired. Those stacks bypassed the desulphurisation plant. The environment department granted an exemption to do that, with a hard stop of 31 March 2025. Unit 3 was put back onto the main stack and the FGD plant in February 2025, with the other two following. The station is not supposed to be running "dirty" any more. For about two years, three of the newest coal units in the country did. ## How it is running now Once Unit 6 went commercial, Kusile stopped being a project and started being judged like any other station. Eskom's September 2026 figures put its year-to-date energy availability factor around 90%, and say it has sent out about 6.8 TWh so far in the financial year, roughly 9% of Eskom Generation's energy. President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the site on 10 April 2026 and quoted a lower average, 74%, with peaks at 90%. The two numbers cover different windows. Both describe a station that is no longer the unreliable one. The wider recovery is visible in the diesel bill. Eskom spent about R33 billion on diesel in the 2024 financial year, R17.7 billion in 2025, and about R7.1 billion in 2026. Load shedding had, by September 2026, been absent for more than 480 days. Kusile is not the only reason. A lot of recovery work happened across the old fleet, and private generation has been growing. A 4,800 MW station that actually runs is still a large part of why the lights have stayed on. About 600 people work there permanently, with around 1,000 contractors in during a major outage. Construction peaked much higher: Eskom cites 39,711 jobs across the build, more than 20,000 of them on site. Ramaphosa put the whole Medupi-and-Kusile programme near 40,000 jobs, over half of them tied to Kusile. ## The Highveld bill that does not show up on a tariff Even with the scrubbers working, Kusile is still a coal station on the Highveld. Winter inversions trap smoke against the escarpment, which is why eMalahleni regularly records some of the worst particulate readings in the country. The wet FGD was the environmental selling point of the design. The 2022 failure, and the two years of bypass stacks, is why neighbouring communities and health groups spent that period arguing the selling point was not being used. That is the tension the plant will live with for the rest of its life. South Africa needed the megawatts. The Highveld already had too much sulphur and dust. Kusile tried to do both, and for a long stretch managed neither particularly well. The megawatts are now there. The airshed is still the airshed. For the household end of the same system, the numbers that land on a prepaid token are in our prepaid electricity calculator. If the point of a more stable grid is to stop thinking about a generator and start thinking about a payback period, the solar savings calculator is the honest version of that sum. ## Frequently asked questions Where is Kusile Power Station? Just outside eMalahleni (Witbank) in Mpumalanga's Nkangala district, about 15 km north of Kendal Power Station, between the N4 and N12. The name is Ndebele for "the dawn has come". How big is Kusile? Six units of 800 MW each, so 4,800 MW at nameplate. With Medupi it makes 9,600 MW. That is a large share of Eskom's coal fleet, and both stations were designed for about 50 years of running. When did Kusile reach full commercial operation? On 29 September 2025, when Unit 6 was handed over to Generation. The unit had been on the grid since 23 March 2025, but commercial operation is the date that counts in official availability figures. Construction started in August 2008. How much did Kusile cost? Eskom's approved construction budget is R160.5 billion, with about R155.5 billion spent by 31 July 2026. Independent estimates have long put the all-in cost nearer R233 billion. The original 2008-era figure was around R80 billion. Eskom does not accept the R233 billion number as a budget or as recorded spend. What happened to the chimney in 2022? On 23 October 2022 a flue-gas duct on Unit 1 failed at an expansion joint. Units 1 to 3 share that chimney, so a large block of capacity came off. Temporary stacks let the units run without the desulphurisation plant until early 2025, under an exemption that expired on 31 March 2025. Is Kusile still causing load shedding? Not in 2026. Eskom has reported energy availability around 90% year to date, and national load shedding had been absent for more than 480 days by September 2026. Kusile is now one of the more reliable stations in the fleet. It was a serious problem in 2022 and 2023, when the west chimney was down. Does Kusile have emission controls? Yes. It is the first coal station in Africa built with wet flue-gas desulphurisation, which is designed to remove most of the sulphur dioxide from the exhaust. Those scrubbers were bypassed on Units 1 to 3 while the chimney was repaired. Eskom says the units have been back on the main stack and the FGD plant since early 2025. For more country-level numbers, see our South Africa key facts page. Every free tool is on the tools and calculators page. _Figures are drawn from Eskom's Unit 6 commercial-operation statement (29 September 2025), Eskom's cost and performance statement of 10 September 2026, President Ramaphosa's 10 April 2026 remarks at the station, Eskom's 2 November 2022 duct-failure statement, and unit handover notices for Units 1, 3, 4 and 5. Last updated September 2026._