Mineral resources and energy minister Gwede Mantashe announced on Monday that the deadline for comment on the draft Integrated Resources Plan (IRP) 2023 would be extended by one month from February 23 to March 23.
Since the publication of the draft plan, which will replace the IRP 2019, in the first week of January, the department of mineral resources and energy has received several requests for the deadline for written comment to be extended.
Addressing the opening of the Investing in African Mining Indaba in Cape Town on Monday, Mantashe said in response to these requests and to “allow maximum participation in this process”, the department decided to extend the deadline.
This extension, said the department’s director-general, Jacob Mbele, will be likely to lead to a one-month delay in finalising the IRP 2023. That had originally been set for the end of May.
The IRP 2023 has been widely criticised for being flawed, lacking ambition (especially for cutting back on renewable energy procurement) and threatening to trap SA in many more years of load-shedding, while procuring too much new capacity from expensive sources of energy such as nuclear and gas.
The plan proposes adding new generation capacity of about 29GW to the grid by 2030 mostly from new gas-to-power and renewable energy capacity.
That is low compared with other studies, including from Eskom and the Presidential Climate Commission, which found SA needs to add 50GMW to 60GW of renewable energy combined with energy storage by 2030 to ensure energy security.
However, the mineral resources and energy department has defended the rationale for adding only 29GW of new capacity, saying increasing the amount of new generation envisaged to come from gas-to-power projects, SA would need less variable generation capacity from renewables.
The long-term scenarios, up to 2050, consider several pathways such as adding up to 14,500MW of new nuclear power or adding about 166,000MW of new capacity from wind, solar, gas and battery storage. One scenario shows new coal capacity of 5,000MW developed using clean coal technologies by 2040.
The reviews for the period to 2030 and the period to 2050 both make the case for delaying the decommissioning of Eskom coal-fired power stations.
Environmental law and justice groups the Centre for Environmental Rights, groundWork and Earthlife Africa, acting together as the Life After Coal Campaign, were among those entities that have requested the deadline be extended.
These organisations said that while the mineral resources and energy department had released the relevant assumptions about the economic and technology costs, and others, upon which the draft IRP was based, that information did not include key information such as the adequate exploration of costs and price comparisons.
Without this and other information upon which the IRP was based, the organisations said, it is not possible to analyse, understand and comment on the proposals, outputs and conclusions of the draft IRP in a meaningful way.
They also called on the department to hold public hearings in addition to accepting written comment on the plan. The mineral resources and energy department’s timeline for deliberation on the draft plan does not make provision for public hearings where citizens can make oral presentations and submissions.
Mbele said their previous experience, with the finalisation of the IRP 2019, showed that only a limited group of entities and individuals participated in public hearings when those were held in each province.
This time around, to speed up the process, the department of mineral resources and energy decided to not host public hearings in the different provinces, but rather a few online discussions during which all interested parties could comment on the draft plan and ask questions for clarity.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.