Giving his weekly energy action plan update on Sunday, electricity minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said exempting schools from load shedding during exams is almost impossible. This is after concerns were raised over load shedding impact on matriculants who are writing their final year examinations.

Ramokgopa said the country is still navigating its energy challenges while he announced losses of up to 17,000 megawatts from the power grid in the past week alone. ?At a principled level, it's very difficult to exempt all schools because if you were to map the density of the geographic locations of the schools you find that the densities of these schools are located in areas of a significant amount of load, that is where there are industries and the like, they share some of the distribution infrastructure with some of the energy-intensive users," he said. Ramokgopha also said that if Eskom were to exempt some schools without a direct link, they would be affected by load shedding at their distribution infrastructure. "Unfortunately, that is not possible. So, I don't want to create an impression that it's going to be possible" Ramokgopa added.

He said that the long-awaited Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) would be released at the end of November. The minister had previously indicated that the IRP, a plan aimed at estimating the country's electricity demand and reducing load-shedding to lower stages, would be released in September 2023, but this has been moved to November. ?It's been under review and one of the things that we thought is necessary is that it's important that there is a very robust intense conversation internally in government so that when Minister Mantashe places the document there is a convergence in government on the configuration of the mix of the energy sources. What delayed it was the amount of robust consultation and we got it from him by the end of November. The IRP 2023 should be out," Ramokgopa explains the delays. He said they are in a race against time-to-end load shedding and have called for greater coordination with municipalities in a bid to aid residents.