Outa wants ‘rushed and defective’ energy plan trashed

Cape Town – Civil rights group Outa has written to Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson requesting her to withdraw the draft Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), it announced on Tuesday.

The civil body fears that, after six years of no energy plan update, the upcoming nuclear new build procurement programme is linked to the rushed approach.

“While the Department of Energy (DoE) have given notice of the presentations to the public at various locations throughout the country on their web site, starting on 7th December 2016, they have not advertised these sessions widely enough and as such, we do not believe this consultative and public engagement process is being conducted meaningfully,” Outa said in a statement.

“The IRP is some six years late and now government appears to be rushing this process through without providing the public and civil society organisations with sufficient time to participate.

“Outa believes that the draft IRP has been reverse engineered to force nuclear into the energy mix and this in itself raises numerous questions about why the DoE is rushing this process.”

Outa’s energy team, headed by energy expert Ted Blom, identified several flaws in the IRP documents and methodology, it said.

Outa believes that if the IRP is signed off, a “process to hastily introduce nuclear energy generation as promoted by Eskom and the beneficiaries of state capture will certainly follow”.

“There are significant problems at both a procedural and a technical level,” said Blom. “Having waited six years for the updated IRP document, we are now being asked to react in a few days to an incomplete document that has already been gazetted, withdrawn and republished just in the last week.

“This means that two different versions of the draft IRP-2016 document are floating about in the public domain and this will add to the confusion,” said Blom.