Ghana: Energy crisis: where now?

In our front page story of today, The Statesman reports new avenues being explored by Government to resolve the deepening energy crisis, now entering its eighth month.

They will hope to raise $750 million on the bond market later this year, to plough back into an energy sector which is about to run dry. As Ghanaians struggle with the new two-day lights out rotation and public protests mount, this solution to the energy problem can not come soon enough.
To paint a small snapshot of the wider nationwide picture, Unilever has predicted that so far, it has incurred costs of around $1million on generator running costs and alternative energy provisions. $1million!

Multiply this several thousand times, and we might come close to the figure Ghanaian businesses have been forced to pay out since the load shedding exercises were instigated in August 2006.

And that is without factoring in the dip in productivity due to the regular power cuts, the loss of export custom to more efficient suppliers, and the cost of the marketing to win back that custom.

Unilever’s losses are simply a drop in the ocean of the leakage of Ghana”s economy; a serious stumbling block to the country’s targets on economic growth and development, which threatens to undermine progress made so far.

Indeed, some economists have predicted the loss so far to be around $2b – a sum which could have been used to double the energy capacity of this country if it had been mobilised, planned, rather than allowed to slip away.

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Another lesson that must be drawn from the present shortage is the folly of building an energy system almost wholly dependent on the weather – no matter how many dams we build in Ghana, if the rainfall is low, if drought should strike, then 50 dams will not produce so much as a single Watt of electricity between them.

The Statesman