ACEP's Press Statement On The Challenges Facing Ghana’s Power Sector: The Load Shedding Politics
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press, we have invited you today to discuss Challenges facing the power sector in Ghana and how to prevent the load shedding and to strategically position the country to achieve capacity long in the medium to long term . ACEP is an independent group which provides informed analysis of energy policy options. We have been encouraged by the efforts made by various governments in Ghana to address the challenges facing our energy sector particularly power subsector. We took notice of the promise by our president that load shedding will end in 2013. Whilst this is commendable, we think that this should be backed by good analysis and technical advice. Our analysis has therefore been necessitated by the uninformed debate on the load shedding situation in the country in recent times. Our analysis largely depend on the data analysis, the demand analysis and the demand forecasting by taking into consideration the various scenarios of supply.
2.0 BACKGROUND
Currently, Ghana’s power sector policy is framed by the Power Sector Reform Programme initiated in the mid-nineties to address the problems of poor quality of supply, unreliable services, poor financial performance of the utilities as well as problems with raising financing for critical infrastructure projects. It was also precipitated in part by a policy shift by the World Bank not to provide any new concessionary loans for power system infrastructure development. Hence it was expected the Reform will create the enabling environment for attracting private investment to the power sector to replace governmental and multilateral sources of funding. The recent energy crisis in the country brought to the fore how far we are from achieving the objective of providing reliable electricity supply to meet Ghana’s developmental goals. The crisis exposed the fragility of our power sector and the fact that we are yet to overcome the fundamental problems that give rise to such recurrent power deficits.
