Ghana: Gov’t Urged To Re-examine Power And Petroleum Contracts

Participants at this year’s 5th Ghana Energy Fair and National Energy Symposium have recommended to government to, as a matter of urgency, consider re-examining both the power and petroleum contracts to ensure that the West African nation benefits more.

They also wanted government to deal with the financial challenges of the energy sector and establish systems to prevent the re-occurence of these challenges.

Additionally, they recommended that government re-look at the current tariff structure to ensure that industries become internationally competitive since electricity forms about 20 to 40 percent of the cost of production.

The five-day Renewable Energy Fair and National Energy Symposium was held at the Accra International Conference Centre in the capital of Ghana, West Africa.

It was under the theme: ‘Opportunity For Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency in a constrained energy sector’.

The conference brought several industry players especially those in the renewable energy sector from Ghana and other parts of the world.

Some of the issues affecting the energy sector raised were:

1. Currently, there is excess grid power capacity and yet end-user tariffs are relatively high;
2. Why can’t Ghana export the excess grid electricity to neighbouring countries that need electricity?
3. Why are SME’s and industries punished with high tariffs to subsidise residential and expect them to progress?
4. Low public awareness of the energy efficiency and energy management;

Some solutions were also proposed by the participants to address the above issues and they included:

1. Review of the existing tariff structure to uniform tariff across the consumption categories;
2. The speedy completion of the West Africa Power Pool project to facilitate export of the excess power to needy countries;
3. Intensification of public education on energy efficiency and energy management.

Recommendations such as the following were also made:

1. Fast track the deployment of rooftop solar in public buildings;
2. More research into the use of renewable energy to solve the country’s post harvest losses;
3. Reviewing of Ghana’s tariff setting structure to encourage and support industries to consume more power for maximum operation and, consequently, wealth creation.

Source:www.energynewsfrica.com