Acquire emergency power plants - ACEP urges govt
The African Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) has proposed that the government should acquire emergency power plants to address the erratic power to avoid its erratic supply to alleviate the predicament of industries that are buckling under the current load-shedding periods of 24 hours of no power and 12 hours of power.
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Meanwhile, it has asked President John Mahama to address the nation on the country's energy situation and the plans the government had worked out to solve the crisis to assuage the frustration and difficulties being experienced by both commercial and domestic users.
The Operations Manager of ACEP, Mr Benjamin Boakye, in an interview with the Daily Graphic, said many agreements in the power sector continued to be signed between parties and the government but those were not immediate solutions to the challenges being faced.
He said ACEP's analysis of those power agreements showed that some were conditional, based on the fulfilment of conditions by the government and the power producers.
“That meant that conditions precedent to the start of the construction of any power supply system had to be met,” he explained.
No immediate power
Mr Boakye said other agreements also did not translate immediately into power production and supply because the power producers had to source for funding and ensure that appropriate arrangements were in place for them to recoup their investments.
As an example, he mentioned the agreement between General Electric and the government, which was conditional to the signing of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) II and the partial privatisation of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to ensure that investors got back their money by selling the power produced profitably.
Projections
In its power sector outlook for 2015, ACEP projected improvement in the provision of energy services, premised on a number of factors, such as the arrival of emergency power barges in the country and the potential for the barges to provide more than 400MW of power to address the immediate power generation challenge.
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The planned ramping up of gas supplies from the Atuabo Gas Processing Plant from the current level to about 120 million standard cubit feet per day, the planned inauguration of the Kpone Thermal Power Plant and the TICO expansion projects, which were expected to add about 330 megawatts of generation capacity, and the improvement in the VRA’s liquidity position to procure light crude oil were other projected aspects of improvement.
But Mr Boakye said those projections did not anticipate that the new injection of power supplies would come with their own challenges; for instance, the failure of power systems and disruptions in gas supplies.