General News of 2012-10-06

President was not advised on load shedding – Researcher

A Research Fellow with the Africa Centre for Energy Policy, John Peter is suggesting that President John Dramani Mahama was not properly advised about the energy situation in the country before promising that loading shedding would be a thing of the past if the NDC is re-elected.

According to Peter, even utility providers like the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) do not share the president’s view considering the company’s plans to redeem the country from the persistent load shedding.

“I have listened to the NDC again saying there would be no load shedding by next year. I think these are political talks; it is not possible, it is not achievable within a short term period, and it is a political dimension that somebody would want to look at it,” he told Jefferson Sackey Friday on Joy FM’s Top Story.

John Peter further noted that: “GRIDCo has made us to understand, which is a technical body, clearly, that they want to reduce the time by 100 hours per a year. Even GRIDCO which is responsible for this power is saying this, where is the president getting his information, telling us that there is going to be no load shedding?

“… So I think the President has got it wrong, to start with, or he has not probably spoken to his technical people to advise him.”

Even though some independent power producers are expected to add extra megawatts to the national production, Peter thinks if the regulatory framework is not well structured and properly strengthened, the country would not make any major headway.

The government should also pay attention to the existing power generating plants that are not currently running on full scale, he counseled.

But Deputy Minister of Energy, Alhaji Inusah Fuseini believes the President was on point when he said load shedding would be a thing of the past.

He enumerated a number of measures underway to ensure that the campaign promise becomes a reality.

According to NDC’s manifesto, it would increase installed power generation capacity from 2,443 in 2012 to 5,000 megawatts by 2016.

Alhaji Inusah Fuseini was confident that Ghana would soon become a net exporter of energy to countries within the sub-region.

“As a country we do not need 5,000 megawatts of power. But we have said in the NDC manifesto that we are prepositioning as a net exporter of power that is why we have got power interconnection agreement with Burkina Faso, with Mali, with Togo, with Benin and with Cote d’Ivoire.”