Chairperson, the DA has welcomed the establishment of the new Department of Energy under Minister Dipuo Peters. The DA has long called for a stand-alone Ministry. We believe that this will facilitate progress and the ability to meet set targets.
However, during the Portfolio Committee on Energy's interaction with the department's budget and strategic plan for the next three years, we expressed certain reservations that the department has promised to address. Amongst them were issues identified by the department that have retarded progress towards the goal to reach the targeted one million solar water heaters in households by 2014.
The Minister has said that this target will be met. The DA will be watching its progress, or the lack thereof, like a hawk. In this regard, I would like to alert the Minister that we are aware of the fact that the target date has somehow shifted from 2013 to 2014, making the five-year term a moving target. This deadline cannot be moved if the demand-side management targets are to be met.
The department has also committed itself to establishing a buying office, an independent sales and marketing office, to break Eskom's monopolistic hold on the buying and selling of electricity in the country and to facilitate the participation of independent power producers in the electricity generation arena. This office should as quickly as possible move out of Eskom, as the Ministry has assured us it would.
The process to produce the Integrated Resource Plan 2, IRP2, seems to be turning sour. The Minister should be aware that we are getting worrying reports that Eskom is hijacking the process for its own narrow interests. This should be stopped as it will negatively impact on the credibility of the report.
This process has not been put in place for the interests of Eskom but for the country's energy security over the next 20 years. We dare not fluff this process through procedural failures. The DA has already made the point that the department's budget is quite stretched, and we welcome the commitment by senior managers to doing more with less. Thus, we support the Budget Vote. [Time expired.]