The president must read this!
I have, this week, made efforts to meet Mr Robert Wood in person. I didn’t succeed. On the evening of Wednesday, I decided that I did not need to meet him to do what I wanted, that is, to present his thoughts to the President of the Republic and beg him to invite this man to the Flagstaff House for an energy discussion.
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This man, known in the scientific community as ‘Crusading Engineer’, has magic in his head. Why must he meet the President? Simple. I have come to the conclusion that the one thing the President lacks is a think tank - particularly and urgently, an engineers think tank – and not worry about which political colours the thinkers wear. As a matter of fact, the President needs a think tank on every facet of the economy. They need not come in large numbers; certainly we don’t need another Senchi get-together to achieve what a small specialist think tank offers.
Call me a Rip Van Winkle. I grant that in the post-1992 political climate in Ghana, you may be right in so describing me, but I can assure you that unlike this fictional character, I have not just woken up after a 20-year sleep, not even a year. On the contrary, as writer T.S. Eliot would put it, I am as wide awake as spectacles.
Before I present Engineer Wood, however, I have a confession to make. Last Wednesday, after listening to Adom FM, I realised that I have been too busy; so busy that I had not had the privilege of hearing a playback of Haruna Iddrisu’s Message to the Fourth Republican Parliament in 2007. Wasn’t that something?, promising that by 2009 (!!!!) if the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was in power, Ghana “would have no excuse whatsoever” to continue experiencing energy crisis! The world is still waiting for 2009.
One more digression before I present Engineer Wood. I don’t think anybody has blamed or is accusing the Mahama Government of being the cause of the energy crisis. If anybody is pointing at Mahama, it is not for starting the ‘Dumsor’ phenomenon; it is for the inability to stop it. Everybody agrees that rather than “manage” it, the problem ought to be fixed permanently. My problem is; why should it take us – or any group of human beings anywhere - three years to fix an energy problem? Did the President not have “fixing” in mind when he promised in 2012 that the problem would be over by the end of 2013?
I heard the “smart companies” bit in the President’s May Day address. My conclusion is that the President’s speech writers, like many of our technocrats, got it wrong. It’s likely that like Vicky Hammah (when she was Minister of State), the President did not read over the speech before presenting it. The Mahama I know would have expunged that bit from the address.
Now here come the thoughts of Engineer Wood on energy.
Solar
On solar power, kindly read his analysis: “It is estimated that solar energy dissipated on 1sq km of the Sahara Desert is equivalent to 1.5 million barrels of crude oil. Ghana’s unique position on the globe (only four degrees above the Equator and the Meridian passing through Tema) gives us exceptional advantage to tap energy from the sun.
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The engineer prescribes three direct ways to harness the sun’s energy, details of which are available on the Internet – which for lack of space cannot be reproduced here.
Wind power
It is now known that wind power is viable whenever oil prices exceed $60.00 per barrel. He says: “Our investigations indicate that we can generate 10,000 megawatts of power from the Volta basin… using 12m by 18 blades with 5m diameter windmills (manufactured in Ghana) producing torque at 1.8m/s wind speed. If the wind turbines are installed triangular at the distance of 300 metres, it should be possible to generate 27,000 megawatts from these towers.”
Biofuels
No oil-bearing seed in the temperate climate has more than 1,000kg of oil per hectare. Yet in the tropics such as ours, we have oil-bearing trees yielding over 3,000kg of oil per hectare. Engineer Wood is certain that if we can mobilise our people to plant about seven million hectares of the almond tree, an-oil bearing plant, Ghana can produce 20 million tons of vegetable oil within six years. On the basis of the German experience, 12 million tons should produce 8,000 megawatts of power.
Biodiesel production
For the production of biodiesel for general transportation needs, we only require caustic soda or potash, and ethanol or methanol. With 20 million tons of oil and our diesel requirement not exceeding one million tons, we can have a sustainable programme to use vegetable oil to meet our transportation needs.
Ethanol
Ethanol has been used as automobile fuel for many years in various regions of the world. Brazil is probably the leading user nation.
In the 1990s, about five million vehicles operated on fuels i.e. 93 per cent ethanol. Ghana has enormous resources for the production of ethanol. All we need to do is to create conditions for harvesting the raw material – cocoa sweating during the drying fermentation process.