By Lydia Kukua Asamoah, GNA
Accra, Feb 21, GNA - The Government is committed to achieving an electricity generation mix that ensures diversity and security of energy supply in the country, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said on Thursday.
“For this reason, we will continue to promote the deployment of renewable energy in line with our policy target of 10 percent renewables in the energy mix from the current one per cent.”
Delivering his State of Nation Address to Parliament in Accra, President Akufo-Addo announced that Ghana’s gas production tripled during the year, from 100 to 300 million cubic feet per day and that the Ministry of Energy was undertaking steps to remove the transmission bottlenecks, to ensure that Ghanaian gas can reach power plants located in the eastern part of the country.
“I am confident that, by August this year, the situation would have been fully remedied to ensure Ghana uses locally produced gas for the bulk of its thermal power generation, saving substantial amounts of foreign exchange on imported fuels.”
He said affordable and reliable energy was absolutely critical to realising the vision of economic transformation.
Another justification for renewable energy was that, in spite of Ghana’s excess electricity generation capacity, it had not been able to achieve the universal access target because there were many Ghanaian communities, especially those on islands and lakesides that could not be reached through the national grid.
He said there were currently 200 island and 2,000 lake side communities that required mini-grids from renewable sources to meet their energy need.
To reduce government’s expenditure on utilities, and also promote the use of solar power for government and public buildings, the Ministry of Energy initiated the Solar Rooftop Programme, of which it was leading by example with the installation of a 65-kilowatt solar rooftop system at its premises.
The Jubilee House – the seat of government, would also be powered, as from August this year, by solar energy, as an example to other public institutions.
“In fact, government’s target is to install up to 200 megawatts of distributed solar power by 2030 in both residential and non-residential facilities in order to reduce Government’s liabilities to ECG (PDS Ghana Ltd)”, he added.
President Akufo-Addo said renewable energy had also become a necessary addition to the energy sector because it had increasingly become cheaper, “and is key to the implementation of our international obligations under Sustainable Development Goal 7, on access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy, as well as Sustainable Development Goal 13, on urgent action to combat climate change”.
He touched on steps taken to fight against corruption in the oil industry and bring about transparency - the establishment of a National Register of Contracts on which all the Petroleum Agreements signed by the Government had been published.
This provides a platform for citizens to scrutinize oil contracts signed by government.
“We have also passed the General Petroleum Regulations, which provide for the disclosure of beneficial ownership information of companies operating in Ghana’s oil and gas industry.
The goal was to make sure that people did not hide in the shadows to appropriate oil blocks to themselves, at the expense of the citizens of Ghana.
He said the interest of major oil companies in Ghana had become dramatic and mentioned ExxonMobil and the Norwegian conglomerate, Aker among oil giants that had signed petroleum exploration agreements with Ghana.
“Through the launch of the Ghana Oil and Gas Licensing Rounds 2018”, the bidding process for the allocation of new petroleum rights to prospective investors, the first such exercise in our history, other global players such as BP, China National Offshore Oil Corporation, and Total have expressed interest in coming to Ghana.
GNA
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