The Integrated Resource Plan 2025: feasible or its a push closer to the fiscal cliff?

ON SUNDAY October 19, 2025, Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgosientsho Ramakgopa presented the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2025 during a ministerial briefing in Pretoria.

- Thomas Garner

A reliable power system underpins economic growth and high electricity consumption correlates with improved quality of life.

The IRP’s stated objective is to ensure security of supply by balancing supply and demand while optimising environmental impact and total cost of supply. In principle, the IRP seeks to secure supply at the lowest possible cost within environmental and other constraints. In practice, the IRP 2025 does not achieve this. The plan proposes increasing nuclear capacity from 1.8 GW to 7 GW by 2039, a net addition of 5.2 GW.

Global experience shows that nuclear projects almost always cost double the original budget and take twice as long as planned. Two slides in the minister's presentation promoted the nuclear case yet offered no evidence of low cost or shorter construction periods, and therefore not securing supply.

Installed coal-fired capacity is projected at 41 GW by 2039, only slightly below today’s 45 GW. About 13 GW of ageing, inefficient coal capacity will retire over the next eight years, but no new coal projects appear in the plan to sustain the total. Instead, the IRP proposes a “clean coal technologies” demonstration plant by 2030 to explore alternatives to conventional flue-gas desulphurisation (FGD).