Ghana’s importation of some 180 megawatts of power from neighboring Ivory Coast is said to be costing nearly $400,000 every day, sources close to the Volta River Authority (VRA) have revealed.
The power is generated at 9 cents per kilowatts in Ivory Coast and sold at 11 cents per kilowatts to Ghana while local producers are selling power between 14 cents and 19 cents.
This comes at a time when government is being forced to look for alternative sources of power to fill the power vacuum that has rocked the nation in recent times as a result of bad weather conditions that have affected the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah, whose turret bearing has become faulty.
Capacity
Ghana’s dependable (i.e. properly fueled and serviced) power production capacity currently is 2,800 megawatt on average, and this is exclusive of both the Karpower barge and Ameri plants.
Meanwhile, peak load consumption (the amount the country consumes when most people are busy consuming power) in Ghana was less than 2000 megawatt currently, our sources disclosed, adding that the peak load had dropped by a whopping 30 percent just as predicted by some policy think-tanks due to the ‘killer’ tariff regime.
Analysis
An analyst, who spoke to BUSINESS GUIDE, said by the afore-stated, the problem of producing enough power had actually reduced though with serious impact on industrial output and revenues of the energy industry.
Bright Simons of IMANI quizzed: “Why does a country that has machines to produce 2800 units of an item but only consumes just 2000 units of the same need to go and buy more machines to produce more units at a cost 50 percent higher than the cost of existing machines? Why not simply invest more in existing producers and enhance their operating environment to ensure that they are producing at optimal capacity?”
He continued: “They said that doing this will take too long. So all the way back in 2014 they started instead to look for ’emergency power’. It still took more than a year and half for the first of these projects to start generating power. The second project is now in its 16th month but is reportedly not producing power, media reports have said.
This is notwithstanding waiving environmental and social impact permits for these projects and agreeing to pay the ’emergency producers’ 50 percent more (even higher per some calculations) than Ghana routinely pays the existing producers.
LNG
Experts have also indicated that with less than the amount spent on government ’emergency’ projects, authorities could have fast-tracked the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects to ensure the availability of reasonably priced gas for the existing producers to supply power at a cost that is 30 percent cheaper than what Ghana is paying Ameri and Karpower.
“If we had started doing this in 2013 as many of us suggested, then the power crisis would have been effectively over early last year without the crazy tariffs that are compounding the problem.”
Unemployment
Many businesses have collapsed as a result of the power crisis and a lot of employees have been sacked because of the high tariffs paid by industries.
By Samuel Boadi