Deadline day and there is still no updated IRP from Gwede Mantashe
31 March 2023
Despite assurances from President Cyril Ramaphosa’s National Energy Crisis Committee and the subsequent January 2023 update on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan by the Presidency, that the review of the 2019 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) will be concluded by the end of March 2023, Minister of Energy, Gwede Mantashe, is on course to miss this self-imposed target. There has been no official communication from DMRE on the status of the review or whether an updated IRP will be released by midnight today.
Without an updated IRP, South Africa will be forced to continue relying on the outdated energy assumptions of IRP 2019 do not reflect what must be done to address the ongoing electricity crisis. Mantashe has repeatedly failed to produce an updated IRP, thereby compromising the country’s ability to effectively make costed projections on electricity demand and the energy sources needed to address it.
The first IRP was released in 2011 (referred to as IRP 2010) under the proviso that it will be updated every two years. IRP renewal windows were missed over the course of the last decade and the latest version, IRP 2019, has remained unchanged for four years. A major shortcoming of IRP 2019 is that it still pushes for prioritised investments in new coal power plants and nuclear energy, a complete contrast to the current reality of increased participation by independent power producers within the renewable energy space.
Mantashe’s stonewalling and refusal to release an updated IRP is hardly surprising, as he has spent much of his tenure as Energy Minister stubbornly advocating for expensive or climate damaging energy sources such as clean coal, nuclear and gas. His intransigence is reinforced by labour unions who demand that coal generation remains the largest component in the energy mix, despite growing evidence that renewable energy has become cheaper and could get South Africa out of the current electricity crisis a lot quicker.