The Department of Energy (DoE) has confirmed that the draft Integrated Energy Planning Report has been approved by Cabinet and will be released during the course of July.
In response to questions posed by Engineering News Online, the DoE said that the draft report was approved on June 26 and would be published for at least 30 days before the first public consultations were held on its contents.
The report forms part of a process to formulate an Integrated Energy Plan (IEP), which will outline a recommended energy roadmap for South Africa and guide investment decisions.
The prevailing Integrated Resource Plan (IRP2010) for electricity, which covers the period from 2010 to 2030, will be updated in parallel. The DoE said the updated IRP would both impact on, and be impacted by, assumptions made in the IEP.
It is widely accepted that the IEP should have been developed ahead of the IRP, but the electricity plan was accelerated following the electricity crisis of early 2008, when Eskom implemented rotational load shedding to avert a possible collapse of the grid.
It is understood that the draft report has been guided by policies such as the National Development Plan and the New Growth Path, as well as other strategies and commitments, such as South Africa’s transport policy, its waters resources infrastructure plan and the country’s climate change policy.