What’s not to like about the IRP 2025? Renewable scale, a 6GW safety net, and a patriotic reboot of the pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) — all wrapped in a headline R2.23-trillion price tag that sounds like a decisive action. Still, the spreadsheet that would make the story accountable is nowhere to be found.
With the cabinet gavel still warm, the IRP 2025 ushers in SA’s single biggest investment programme of the post-apartheid era. The plan promises more than 105,000 MW of new capacity by 2039, with the energy mix shifting from coal’s once-hegemonic 85% to a more modest 27%, nuclear and gas each muscle in for about 16% between them, tripling their contribution to the electricity pie.
The plan architects double down on renewables. Good. But then graft onto that green backbone an aggressive, politically attractive sprint into a gas and nuclear industrialisation plan that revives PBMR, a project mothballed after a decade and R12bn of lessons learned the hard way.
The gas pitch is a classic bargain. It’s fast firming that avoids diesel peakers and steadies the industry. The problem is the numbers and the execution. The plan allocates 6,000 MW to gas to power and raises the minimum loan factor for initial plants to 50%, effectively mandating utilisation rate and committing to volume commitment to gas projects.
Call it what it is: a volume commitment. A computer model system planners use to design the least cost power system, or the so-called optimiser, left to its own devices, would frequently prefer cheaper renewables plus batteries. Mandate capacity and utilisation floor, and you change the outcome and the price.
That’s not theory; it’s banking practice. Lenders and developers see a government target and price risk differently. The moment you publish a capacity line and a guaranteed run rate, you lower revenue risk for a gas project, and the market responds by lining up terminals, offtakes and upstream bets to meet that signalled demand.
Industry bodies like the Industrial Gas Users of Southern Africa read the IRP this way and warn that implementation could multiply gas consumption several-fold. If true, that’s a structural shift in the energy balance sheet.
To be sure, the gas provides quick, reliable power to cover shortfalls in supply or sudden surges in demand, cleaner than diesel peakers and a practical hedge against crippling loadshedding while storage scales. Fair enough. Insurance has a price. The plan does not show the receipt. There’s no way to know how much consumers will pay for the insurance or whether cheaper alternatives will deliver similar reliability for less money. If battery costs fall or storage deployment accelerates, does the government have a clause to scale back capacity obligations? That’s the kind of conditionality the plan must show.
Then there’s the nuclear encore. The PBMR revival is emotionally potent — homegrown tech, jobs, and industrialisation — and smells of ambitions. It also smells faintly of the 2000s when R12bn went down the drain amid governance failures and no commercial rollout.
Granted, nuclear is zero carbon in operation, but its climate payoff depends on timely delivery and fiscal discipline. Decades of delay and cost overruns turn an emissions asset into a deferred liability; every year a reactor is late is a year of missed emissions reductions and a year of bills transposed onto households and industry.
If the IRP 2025 were serious it would publish the optimiser outputs and all sensitivity runs, release the PMBR business case and make insurance explicit by showing how much is paid, to whom, and under what conditions it can be clipped if cheaper alternatives deliver as promised.
