Power from Cote d’Ivoire: Inefficient plants to blame – ACEP

The Executive Director of the African Center for Energy Policy (ACEP), Dr. Mohammed Amin Adams, has blamed inefficient generating plants as one of the reasons Ghana has resorted to buying power from Cote d’Ivoire.

Ghana currently imports 185 megawatts of power from Cote d’Ivoire to support the country’s increasing demand and Dr. Adams said this was “because the choice of plants for generation in Ghana does not give room to efficiency.”

Speaking to Citi News, he noted that the power from Cote d’Ivoire was indeed cheaper hence the prudent in importing as “it would not be out of economics if you want to rely on cheaper power from another country because your own power is expensive.”

But Dr. Adams indicated that this development “also tells us the problem we face is with the procurement of power in Ghana.”

Thus he says the question we should be asking is: “why is it that our power is more expensive that the power we import from Ivory Coast? Why is it so?”

To compound the problem of efficiency, Dr. Adams also pointed out that Ghana is “also allowing plants that are not fuel efficient and therefore, they consume so much fuel and therefore they consume so much fuel and also, the kind of procurement we do is not through open and competitive bidding process.”

By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana