Electricity and Energy Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa yesterday said an update of the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP will be available in the first quarter 2025.

On November 26 there will be a stakeholder engagement meeting with those entities who submitted “substantive” comments after the draft IRP 2023 was released on January 4, 2024.

The original timeline was to have the IRP 2023 ready in May 2024, but after receiving more than 4 300 comments, the government decided to relook at the IRP and have the South African National Energy Development Institute incorporate some of the suggestions.

“The draft IRP 2023 had two time horizons. The first one was until 2030 and that was to address the problem of load shedding. I am happy to say that on November 19 we have had the longest period of no load shedding in five years, so this time horizon falls away. The time horizon is now until 2050,” Ramokgopa said.

The IRP serves as the government’s strategic framework for planning South Africa’s energy supply and is meant to be updated periodically. It aims to align future energy demand with available resources, necessary capacity additions and incorporate new technologies as they arise.

This already-challenging task is further complicated by the transition to a carbon-neutral energy mix (by 2050) alongside the challenges posed by an ageing coal fleet, grid capacity constraints, and the intermittency of renewable energy sources, which is why some commentators could not understand why no further pumped storage capacity was in the draft IRP 2023, whereas the IRP 2019 had included an increase of just more than 1 500 Megawatts (MW).

Ramokgopa said the IRP would be updated every two to three years as more frequent updates did not make sense as economic growth and technology did not change that frequently.

He also stressed that all technologies would be in the policy mix, as it was not the case of one technology being above the other, but rather that the technologies worked together.

The IRP needed to address three separate themes. The first was security of electricity supply and that meant incorporating high demand growth as the Bureau for Economic Research (BER) at Stellenbosch University had said that if the electricity and logistics challenges can be overcome, then 3.5% economic growth in the next two years was attainable.

The second theme was to reduce the cost of electricity. Ramokgopa noted that Eskom’s improved plant performance had meant that Eskom needed to use the expensive diesel-powered Open Cycle Gas Turbines far less than last year, resulting in a saving of more than R15 billion and this saving would be available in future.

The third theme was the environmental impact and the IRP had to make sure that there was no policy misalignment between what was needed in terms of energy security and what the government had committed to in terms of reducing carbon dioxide emissions as detailed in the Nationally Determined Contribution, whereby every country defines its own mitigation target.

The briefing also addressed the issue of updating prepaid electricity customers to Key Revision Number (KRN) 2 by November 24.

“As a minister I have no ability to extend this deadline, as it is a technical issue. We know that there are more than 2 million consumers who have not bought electricity in the past eight months, as those who have bought electricity recently have been able to update to KRN 2,” he said.

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