The department of mineral resources & energy wants to have the final version of the Integrated Resources Plan (IRP) 2023, which has been widely criticised for lacking ambition in terms of adding new renewable energy capacity to the grid, to be ready by the end of May.
However, the department’s director-general, Jacob Mbele, said on Tuesday he doubts whether this timeline could be met.
The draft IRP 2023, which will replace the 2019 version of the plan, was published for public comment on Thursday. The public has been given until February 23 to submit written comments, but by Tuesday afternoon the department had not yet published all the data that was used to inform the assumptions that underpin proposals in the plan.
The reason for the rush, said Mbele, was because “the longer it takes to finalise the [plan] the more the assumptions in the IRP 2023 will get outdated”.
The timeline gives the department up to end-March to review and consider public comment, allows one month to end-April for National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) consultations, and finally one month to end-May to make final changes based on all the feedback.
These, however, are “indicative timelines”, said Mbele. During deliberations on the IRP 2019 the Nedlac consultations alone took about a year, he pointed out.
The rush to get the plan finalised has nothing to do with the upcoming general elections (the date of which must still be confirmed) or the desire to sign off the IRP 2023 during the current administration, he said.
To allow for oral presentations from the public the department plans to host public workshops on January 18 and 31.
Among the criticisms of the draft version of the plan, as previously reported by Business Day, is its low ambition in terms of adding new capacity to the grid by 2030, especially renewable energy.
The plan proposes adding new generation capacity of about 29GW to the grid by 2030. That is low compared with other studies, including from Eskom, which found SA needs to add 50GMW to 60GW of renewable energy combined with energy storage by 2030 to ensure energy security.
In its “emerging plan” for the period up to 2030 the draft plan makes provision for a combined rollout of about 8GW of wind and solar power from 2024 to 2030. This is a dramatic reduction compared to what was presented in the IRP 2019, which made provision for about 14GW of new renewable energy to be added to the grid over the same period.
Mbele said one of the reasons for the reduction was new assumptions in the IRP 2023 which projected much lower energy demand. In contrast with the IRP 2019, the new version also suggests adding more than 4GW of gas-to-power generation capacity by 2030. This, he said, would lower the demand for renewable energy.
According to the IRP 2023, due to slow economic growth and the impact of load-shedding, energy demand in 2023 was about 20% lower than was projected five years ago in the IRP 2019.
The revised version of the plan expects energy demand to remain below the previous forecast until the early 2040s — over the next decade it expects energy demand to increase less than 10%.
The IRP 2023 has also been criticised for presenting several energy procurement scenarios up to 2030 that will not solve the country’s energy crisis.
As reported in Business Day, Anton Eberhard of the Power Futures Lab at the University of Cape Town called the IRP 2023 “an admission of failure” by the government in its efforts to eliminate load-shedding.
The plan suggests that SA will face electricity supply gaps for at least the next four years. This was in contrast with projections by Eskom and the national energy crisis committee (Necom) that sees load-shedding ending in 2025 if the interventions in the energy action plan are successfully implemented.
A key feature of Necom’s energy action plan and Eskom’s generation recovery plan is to improve the energy availability factor (EAF) — actual generation performance as a percentage of total installed capacity — of its fleet of power stations from where it now stands at under 55% to 65%-70% by 2025.
Most of the scenarios presented in the IRP 2023 for the period up to 2030 assumed the EAF will continue to deteriorate to about 51% by 2030. Only one scenario assumes a recovery.
Addressing the media on Tuesday, electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said he was not concerned with the “conservative” approach the department has taken in the IRP 2023 in terms of Eskom’s recovery.
“The IRP generates several scenarios, some are optimistic about the outlook for an improvement in Eskom’s generation performance while some are pessimistic, predicting further deterioration in performance. In those scenarios that take a more conservative view load-shedding is expected to end only in 2027 or even later,” he said.
But, said Ramokgopa, there is no “tension” between the IRP 2023 and the outlook presented by Necom according to which load-shedding is expected to be resolved by 2025.
“The work we are doing is to end load-shedding sooner,” he said.
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