The South African Ministry of Energy is to release an updated electricity plan this month. Analysts will be hoping it will launch the country’s power sector into a modern sustainable, clean power future, and that outdated, and financially unfeasible facets of previous plans will be laid to rest.
The Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) projects the country’s long-term electricity needs and defines the infrastructure developments needed to meet power production. Government uses it to work out the number and type of power stations to construct, as well as the time frames for their commissioning and the occasional retirement of old plants.
The intention was to update the plan every two years. But the last plan, adopted in 2011, is already seven years old. It envisaged a substantial increase in electricity demand from 39GW in 2010 to 68GW in 2030. The extra capacity was to come from an additional 9.6GW of nuclear power, 17.6GW from solar and wind renewable technologies (which were quite new at the time) and 6.3GW from new coal plants.
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The Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) projects the country’s long-term electricity needs and defines the infrastructure developments needed to meet power production. Government uses it to work out the number and type of power stations to construct, as well as the time frames for their commissioning and the occasional retirement of old plants.
The intention was to update the plan every two years. But the last plan, adopted in 2011, is already seven years old. It envisaged a substantial increase in electricity demand from 39GW in 2010 to 68GW in 2030. The extra capacity was to come from an additional 9.6GW of nuclear power, 17.6GW from solar and wind renewable technologies (which were quite new at the time) and 6.3GW from new coal plants.
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