President John Mahama has disclosed that the power situation in Ghana has stabilised to the point that the country is now heading towards the generation of excess power.
According to him, Ghana through effective measures, has managed to fix the energy crises – popularly called Dumsor – that bedeviled the country from August 2012. The situation, which lasted for more than two years, caused a load shedding regime.
Delivering his last State of the Nation address before Parliament Thursday, the President noted that the shortage of power led to a very unpopular load management programme which hobbled the growth of the economy with many businesses resulting to generators to survive.
After taking responsibility for the crises, President Mahama said, “It has taken a lot of hard work and effort. Fast-tracking the deployment of emergency plants and speeding up the completion of ongoing plants ensured that we added more than 800 megawatts of power over an 18-month period.”
He opined that, the measures implemented by his government has “increased generation, in addition of the Energy Sector Levy, and ongoing works to restructure the Legacy Debt of the power utilities, has helped to stabilise the power situation in our country.”
With the expectation of more domestic gas from the TEIN and Sankofa fields, Ghana is entering into an era of energy self-sufficiency,” President Mahama assured Ghanaians.
“Indeed, the warning signals have started sounding about the danger of overcapacity and excess redundancy in our power generation sector.
We have agreed to work with World Bank to rationalise the addition of new plants and ensure that we achieve optimum utilisation of existing plant capacity,” he added.
President Mahama revealed that, access to power under his administration has continued to increase. “Ghana has one of the highest access to electricity estimated to be above 80% currently.”
He added that, additional pending electrification programmes like the China Water Company programme and the Hunan Energy project will bring more communities onto the national grid.
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