Ghana’s effort of ensuring that the country does not become a dumping ground for used obsolete and inefficient electrical appliances has yielded positive results.
It is interesting to note that within the last seven years, the country’s technical electricity regulator, the Energy Commission, has succeeded in prohibiting the importation of about 4.2 million used obsolete and inefficient refrigerators into the country.
The importation of used obsolete and inefficient refrigerators and other electrical appliances into the West African nation brought about environmental hazards as well as inefficient use of electrical energy.
To address the issue, the Energy Commission put together several regulations that were duly passed by Ghana’s Parliament to set a benchmark on the Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) before being allowed into the country.
It also sorts to revise the regulation, L.I. 1932 (2008) which prohibits the importation of used obsolete and inefficient electrical appliances to make it more punitive and add obsolete accessories which were considered as a legal lacuna.
In a presentation by Edwin Kwasi Tamakloe, Senior Officer for Energy Efficiency Regulations, and Hubert Zan, Assistant Manager at the Energy Commission at a stakeholder meeting on the new regulations on electrical appliances last Monday, it showed that importation of used obsolete and inefficient refrigerators had declined drastically within the last seven years.
According to the data that was presented, 224,100 used obsolete and inefficient refrigerators were imported into the country in 2005.
The figure rose on yearly basis hitting about 419,145 in 2012.
However, in 2013, upon the full enforcement of the L.I. 1932 (2008), the figure dropped to 158,699 in 2013 and drastically reduced to 3,944 in 2020.
According to Edwin Kwasi Tamakloe, looking at the consistent increases in the smuggling of used obsolete and inefficient refrigerators into the country, the passage of the LI 1932 prohibited 4.2 million refrigerators from coming into the country between 2013 and 2020.
This, he said, has also resulted in total savings of 5,062 gigawatts hour (GWh) of electricity (about half of the Thermal generation in 2018).
He revealed that since the enforcement of the ban on used obsolete and inefficient refrigerators, 46,660 used and 11,003 used RACs had been confiscated.
Touching on the transformation that has taken place in the refrigerator market since the ban on used refrigerators, he noted that the enforcement of the L.I. 1958 (2009), which sets Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) for refrigerators in the country, has been a huge success.
Therefore, the regulation has been revised to be relevant to technological change since its passage in 2009.
He noted that the importation of energy-efficient refrigerators has witnessed consistent growth from below 30,000 to over 600,000 in 2021.
According to him, about 3.74 million new refrigerators have been imported into the country since 2006.
There was, therefore, the need to replicate the success story of the appliance Standards and Labelling by identifying appliances with potentially high energy savings and setting Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) to protect the Ghanaian consumer from high bills as a result of used old Obsolete appliances and new sub-standard appliances.
Source: https://energynewsafrica.com