France's power generation giant Alstom on Friday announced that it has signed a contract worth about €125 million (about R1.6 billion) with South Africa's state-owned utility Eskom to retrofit the low-pressure turbines of the two 970MWe units at Koeberg nuclear power station.

Alstom said the retrofit would increase South Africa's sole nuclear power station's output by over 65MW, improve availability and reliability, as well as extend the lifetime of the plant.

The retrofits of the two steam turbines will be carried out during planned refuelling outages, thus reducing the chance of interruption to generation from the station.

Eskom and Alstom have worked together on previous projects such as the retrofitting of the Arnot power plant, an integrated retrofit project providing a capacity increase to that station of more than 300MW.

Eskom recently placed orders for new equipment contracts with Alstom for the Medupi and Kusile coal-fired power plants producing 4,800MW each.