South Africa’s new energy plan to become law in April South Africa’s new energy resource plan, which will determine the country’s electricity mix over the next 20 years, would be passed into law by the start of next month, a government official said yesterday.

The draft Integrated Resource Plan (IRP 2) has called for nuclear and renewable energy to play a bigger role in plugging the country’s power deficit as it seeks to halve its reliance on coal, which supplies 95 percent of South Africa’s power.

Investors in the top platinum producer and major gold supplier are watching for moves to boost the power supply after a 2008 crisis forced mines to shut for days, costing South Africa billions of rands in lost output.

The plan came under fire late last year and was delayed after industrial leaders, bankers and environmentalists questioned its costs, timelines and feasibility. But Thabang Audat, the chief director of electricity in the Department of Energy, said the process of passing the plan into law was continuing. “With the expectation that the cabinet process will take up till the end of March, come the first of April, we should have a promulgated (integrated resource) plan,” he said on the sidelines of an energy conference in Johannesburg. After the cabinet has dealt with it, the legislation has to be approved by Parliament, before the president signs and promulgates the act so that the law takes effect. Private producers have said that they could easily supply power to the grid at no cost to Eskom nor to the National Treasury if given the chance, but they needed a policy framework to do so.

They have been frustrated by delays in passing the plan after spending millions in getting projects off the ground. Africa’s biggest economy currently relies on coal for almost all of its electricity supply, but the draft of the plan proposed nuclear supplying 14 percent of the country’s energy mix by 2030 and renewable sources 16 percent. The remaining capacity was proposed to come from open cycle gas turbines, pump storage schemes and imported power generated from hydroelectric plants.

Eskom said it expected South Africa’s power demand to grow 2 percent this year but warned that supply would remain tight until its new power plants came on stream. “The supply-demand margin will remain slim for the next five to six years and in particular the next two years,” Kannan Lakmeeharan, an Eskom executive, told the conference. – Reuters