The supplementary budget for 2016 has been presented to parliament for approval. The Africa Centre for Energy policy, in consonance with our mandate on the governance of the energy sector wishes to present our analysis of the statement. The analysis therefore focuses on the power sector and the Petroleum sector.

The Power Sector

The power sector generation challenges which plunged the country into four year of power crisis saw substantial improvement in power supply to the grid which was enough to eliminate the supply deficit. ACEP at the time recognised the efforts made by government to introduce new generation plants and procurement of fuel to bring on stream some existing power plant.

However, we cautioned that the situation was too fragile for comfort. The challenge with fuel insecurity and the addition of more expensive generation plant posed real threat to both supply and demand security respectively. Also, lack of reserve margin made it unrealistic to declare an end to load shedding. It is therefore not surprising that today we are back to load shedding, though officially not recognised as such. The budget highlighted some positive steps being taken to improve the governance of power sector and restore the financial viability of Volta River Authority (VRA).