Former Minister of Power and MP for Pru East, Dr. Kwabena Donkor, has red flags on Ghana possibly being plunged right back to the days of power outages in the next three years.
He warned that if the government fails to increase the country’s power generation capacity, load shedding will be the only option as there will not be enough capacity to meet demand.
He observed that in spite of the fast-growing demand and consumption of electricity, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government led by President Nana Akufo-Addo has failed woefully to increase the country’s generation capacity to meet supply.
Speaking in an interview in Parliament on Monday 4th April, Dr. Donkor indicated that Ghana is currently tethering on the brink of an electricity power crisis because the government has not taken adequate steps since 2017 to increase the country’s total supply.
He said, “This country is most likely to face load-shedding in the next two years if urgent steps are not taken from this moment to increase our power generation.”
“Power consumption demand increases between 7% and 15% every year, and it takes a minimum of three years to bring on stream a new thermal plant. We seem to be sleepwalking into a situation of possible power outages as a result of supply limitation.”
He disclosed that the current generation capacity of the country is hovering just above 3,300kw, which incidentally is just a little above the peak demand and stressed if this does to increase in the next few years, the situation could be dire.
Ghana has recently enjoyed a fairly stable power supply, with isolated cases of outages in various parts of the country.
This has supported the government’s claim that it has fixed the problem of power outages in the country.
The government has already indicated that it is presently focused on reviewing all agreements signed with Independent Power Producers (IPPs) to ensure that it does not incur unnecessary expenses.