Patrick Asare: Lungu got it completely wrong; I gain nothing from coal power plant in Ghana
Lungu got it completely wrong; Patrick Asare has nothing to gain from a coal power plant in Ghana
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I found Professor N. Lungu’s critique of my recent article, which I wrote in support of the government’s plan to build a coal power plant in Ghana, so incoherent that my first inclination after reading it was to simply ignore it.
I changed my mind after looking at some of his other writings and seeing the kind of language that he uses in reference to people whose views he doesn’t agree with. It is necessary, in my view, to engage people like Lungu who, masquerading as intellectuals, use their bullying tactics to stifle the kind of robust debate that must be had in Ghana in order to solve the country’s myriad problems.
In his critique, Lungu wasted a lot of ink in his desperate attempt to paint me as an unqualified judge of the issue at stake. He hastily drew the conclusion that, because I work for an energy company that is a part-owner of a coal power plant in the US, I have a conflict of interest that makes me an impartial supporter of the government’s policy. That assertion might make some sense only if any or all of the following conditions were true: if UGI Energy Services, my employer, were a coal producer looking for markets for its products; if UGI Energy Services were actively seeking to invest in the Ghanaian energy market in some other fashion; and, if, in writing the article, I was acting as a spokesperson for my employer.
First, UGI Energy Services does not mine coal, and would therefore not benefit financially in any way if Ghana were to build the coal power plant and start to import coal. Second, the company has no plans to invest in any capacity now or in the future in the Ghanaian energy market. Third, nobody in my company knows anything about the coal plant article, and other energy industry-related articles that I have written previously for publication in Ghana. I write as a private citizen whose only interest is in putting some ideas out there in the Ghanaian public square, to help the nation in its quest for solutions to its energy sector problems. Whether those ideas make sense, or not, is for others to judge.
I stayed at my brother’s house during one of my recent visits to Ghana. One afternoon, while he and his wife were cooking and doing laundry, the power suddenly went out. The washing machine happened to be in the spin cycle at that moment, with the motor turning at several thousand revolutions per minute. The power interruption obviously brought the machine to an abrupt stop. About 10 minutes later, the power came back on and my brother switched on the washing machine, only for it to be stopped abruptly again after a few minutes due to another power interruption.
Fortunately for my brother and his wife, they had a generator, which they were eventually forced to switch on in order to complete the laundry and cooking that they were doing, because the power was not restored for the remainder of the afternoon. That experience stuck with me. It is the sort of aggravation that people have had to deal with for so many years in recent times in Ghana. That is the reason why I have become so motivated to do what I am doing on these energy issues in Ghana.
In the 21 years that I have lived in the US, I have, based on my recollection and calculation, had my lights go out only briefly on four separate occasions, for a cumulative total of less than 20 hours. I lost power on those occasions not because the power companies did not have fuel, nor because someone failed to maintain some equipment. Each of those brief outages was due to some force majeure. I have probably been luckier than most people, but the lights generally stay on all the time in the advanced world, and it is important for countries like Ghana to learn how that has been accomplished.
Apparently, Lungu has a problem with the statement of some of my credentials and work experiences at the end of my articles. Where I come from, it is customary for people to want to know what qualifies a person to speak or write on a given subject. My academic training and energy industry work experiences are what have given me a very good understanding of the policy mistakes that have caused the perennial energy crisis in Ghana. I have criticized the current and past governments in many of my articles for the way in which energy policy has been conducted in Ghana. I will continue to write periodically on energy issues in Ghana, whenever I feel that I have something useful to say.
Lungu relies on some scant information that he found on my company website to make his claim that my employer, for all practical purposes, is a coal power company. There is no company on this planet that provides, on its website, a comprehensive list of every asset that it owns. Someone claiming to be a professor ought to know something this basic.
UGI Energy Services does have a 5.9% stake in a 1,711 MW coal power plant in Pennsylvania, but that represents a tiny fraction of its energy assets, and the company is not a one-trick pony, as Lungu would like people to believe. It is a truly well-diversified energy company, owning 17 solar power plants in the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey, with additional plants being planned for construction. The company owns a landfill gas power generation plant (a renewable energy source), a natural-gas fired power plant, and markets a variety of other energy products. It also owns and operates pipelines that carry natural gas from production to consuming centers in the northeastern part of the US.
A big problem for Lungu is that Ghana would have to import the coal that it would need. He must surely know that Ghana does not manufacture the solar panels, inverters and other equipment needed to convert the sun’s “free” energy into electricity, and that those must be imported from China and other far-away places. He must also know that Ghana is a country that imports almost everything that it consumes. Strangely, when it comes to coal, he is all of a sudden worried about availability and cost. The way Lungu talks, I am very surprised that he has not called for a complete ban of the use of charcoal, kerosene lamps, diesel- and gasoline-powered generators, and cars in Ghana, unless he is unaware that those things pollute the environment as well.
Solar power is simply not yet ready to provide the large quantities of continuous power that businesses and industries need to keep their operations running. I just finished writing a fairly lengthy white paper on existing and emerging electricity storage technologies and their economics. The paper is based on an extensive review of existing literature on the subject, and a look at some storage facility installations around the world. Industry experts generally agree that the current technologies are either impractical for use in large-scale applications, or overly expensive.
Globally, more and more people are getting serious about reducing dependence on fossil fuels, and rightly so. If solar power were indeed cheaper than conventional power, and could power the world now, as Lungu would like his audience to believe, the transition to that form of power would be a lot faster than it actually is currently. Investors would also not rush for the exits as soon as there is any talk, anywhere in the world, of cutting subsidies to the solar industry. In most parts of the world, the expectation is that even if possible, it would be a matter of decades before solar power would become a practical alternative to conventional power for industrial use. Ghana simply cannot wait that long; the country must do what it has to do to get its economy moving.
In an article titled “Ending energy poverty: Power to the powerless”, which appeared in the February 27, 2016 edition of The Economist, Bill Gates is quoted as saying that if you want to attract manufacturing jobs, you can’t have intermittent energy (like solar power), and that if you want energy at less than 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, that is not some battery connected up to intermittent forces. The same article talks about a $24m utility-scale solar plant in Rwanda that generates electricity at 24 cents per kilowatt-hour, with industry executives saying that they could produce the electricity at half that price using natural gas. On such matters, I will take the word of Bill Gates, and that of the energy industry executives, over that of Lungu any day.
The author is the manager of retail power marketing at UGI Energy Services, LLC, a diversified energy services firm in Pennsylvania, USA. He was previously a financial analyst at UGI. Prior to UGI, he worked as a senior electrical engineer at Caterpillar, Inc. in the US. He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University in Indiana, USA, and an MBA from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA.
Email: kpoasare@gmail.com
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