VRA launches 50th anniversary celebration

Aboadze (W/R), Jan 12, GNA - Alhaji Inusah Fuseini, a Deputy Minister of Energy, has launched the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Volta River Authority (VRA) under the theme 93Powering the Economy of Ghana and settin= g the Standard for Public Sector Excellence" at Aboadze near Takoradi. He said the government had given approval to the VRA to seek funding through the United Nations (UN) Kyoto Agreement for the development of renewal energy particularly solar and wind.

This forms part of the various interventions being put in place to mee= t the country's energy demand.

Alhaji Fuseini said Ghana was well endowed with a variety of energy resources including biomass, hydrocarbons, hydropower, solar and wind. The country also has the capacity to produce modern bio-fuels and is exploring options to develop nuclear energy Alhaji Fuseini said the government, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, VRA and GRIDCo are developing gas processing and power generating plants The plants will utilize gas in the Jubilee Field close to Bonyere in the Western Region to supplement gas supply from the West Africa Gas Pipeline from Nigeria.

Alhaji Fuseini said the country's electricity requirement was growin= g at about 10 per cent per annum and this means about 500 megawatts generatio= n capacity would have to be added every 10 years to catch up with the demand. VRA's generation capacity has grown from the initial 588 megawatts in 1965 to 1,765 megawatts and that projects are ongoing in the power sector aimed at increasing the installed power generation capacity from 2,000 megawatts to 5,000 megawatts by 2015. The projects are also to increase electricity access from the current level of 66 per cent to universal access by 2020. "We also expect enormous improvement in power delivery to the end user by 2015", Alhaji Fuseini said. He said the government was creating the right environment for private/public partnership in the development of new power plants essential to the growth of the power sector. Alhaji Fuseini said the biggest obstacle to achieving this is the issu= e of cost recovery tariff which is a challenge that is being addressed by the Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC) with government cooperation by the introduction of Automated Adjustment Formula (AAF).