There is no question that South Africa truly does need to update its Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), with the demand, supply and technology cost assumptions in the prevailing 2019 edition having been out of date from the very day of gazetting, let alone nearly four years later. Yet given South Africa’s fraught electricity planning environment, those calling for an urgent update should also be “careful what they wish for”.

A glimpse of just how fraught was provided after the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) released its recommendations on South Africa’s electricity system, which indicated that a least-cost approach would involve a massive scale-up in the building of variable renewables, supported primarily by battery storage and gas peakers. The commission argued, too, that it made no economic sense to build any new coal or new nuclear.

The reaction from the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE), which is working on the IRP update, was both cold and chilling, with one of its senior officials immediately moving to undermine the report as lacking any understanding of how the system operates.

Reading between the lines – which is all that one can do in light of the opacity surrounding the DMRE’s updating process – it is apparent that the department plans to include the very technologies that the PCC argues should be excluded. Likewise, it appears that the DMRE is planning an all-out assault on the concept of ‘least-cost’, so that technologies that fall foul of that standard can be shoehorned into the IRP through a series of ‘policy adjustments’, to be justified on the basis of either system stability or socioeconomic benefits.

Now, there is nothing wrong with an elected government making policy adjustments to a plan such as the IRP to meet certain social, economic or industrial objectives. However, for the sake of our economy and society, the overriding objective must be to achieve reliable electricity supply in the quickest time and at the lowest cost possible. Any political adjustments that are considered must be coherently explained if they are to veer from this foundational starting point.

Once a technoeconomic assessment is completed and verified, any policy adjustments should flow from a transparent and broad-based public consultation process. The cost and benefits of the adjustments must be made clear so that sufficient consensus can be reached about whether they are indeed justified.

Naturally, a variable renewables-led approach – which will undoubtedly emerge as South Africa’s most affordable route forward – poses complications for system operation and carries costs that must also be made fully transparent.

It is up to the DMRE to prove that these costs are unbearably high, however. Simply alluding to potential system disruption is not sufficient to warrant significant deviation from the least-cost foundation. Throughout the world system operators are needing to come to terms with new ways of managing national electricity systems.

All of the credible technoeconomic analysis produced to date indicates that South Africa is in the enviable position of being able to shift to a cleaner and more job-intensive energy system without having to stray materially from least cost.