With the country struggling to generate enough power to meet increasing demands, the Volta River Authority (VRA) has stated it needs approximately $1.5billion to improve power generation.
The Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCO) has attributed the erratic power supply to the irregular supply of gas from Nigeria.
According to the Authority’s Head of Corporate Communications Sam Fletcher, even though there are currently investments in the power sector, those investments should have begun over 20 years ago.
Citing Ghana’s first President as example, he said, “Kwame Nkrumah had a vision that is so wonderful, we needed only 10% of Akosombo’s capacity at that time as a country. We needed 60 megawatts, he built 600 megawatts.”
Ghana is still struggling with 2,800 megawatts of power and the country must start investing or else “as the load keeps growing our problems will get worse.”
He estimated that the amount of money required to begin addressing the power crisis is about $1.5billion.
He explained that one megawatt of power generated costs about one million dollars and “so if we have a deficit of say 500 megawatts, we need $500 million to fix it. If we need a reserve of 500 megawatts, we need another $500 million to fix it so that’s a billion [dollars]. Maybe if we want to have our fuel security going and we want to build Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) another $500 million should do.”
Mr Fletcher assured that, “today if you give me $1.5 billion I’m sure we will be able to move our power system a little forward. What we need to do is to plug your deficit, the mole which is causing the load shedding and if you can have a half a billion to fix that and another half a billion to build your reserve – 25% of your reserve. The other half a billion dollars for fuel security.”
Business World (quotes from myjoyonline)