$1.5 billion needed to end ‘dumsor dumsor’ – VRA

• Posted on November 17, 2014
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

The Volta River Authority (VRA), Ghana’s main power generator has projected that about $1.5 billion is needed to improve the country’s power generation to end the crisis.

With the country currently struggling to generate enough power to meet increasing demands, the VRA believes an aggressive investment in the sector is the solution.

Ghana is currently facing difficulties in managing a load shedding scheme that power generators, transmitters and distributors have put in place to manage shortfalls in generation.

Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCO) has explained that the erratic power supply to consumers currently is as a result of the difficulty in getting gas from Nigeria.

Mr Samuel Fletcher, VRA’s Head of Corporate Communications speaking on the Super Morning Show on Joy FM Monday with show host Kojo Yankson said while there are currently investments in the sector, those investments should have started several years ago.

“Today various stakeholders, various partners including governments are helping us invest in a number of projects for the future” which will come to fruition in about two years’ time,” he said.

Mr Fletcher lamented that investments in the power sector should have been done more than 20 years ago. Citing Ghana’s first President, he said, “Kwame Nkrumah had a vision that was 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 warned.

Mr. Fletcher estimated the total amount of money required to fix the power crisis on a sustained basis to be around $1.5 billion.

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.

-Ernest Dela Aglanu