Avoid piecemeal approach to resolving power challenges confronting Africa - Veep
The Vice-President, Mr Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, has observed that the power challenges confronting African countries are as a result of their failure to respond to the rapid expansion of the economic potential of the continent.
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He explained that energy development had failed to keep pace with rising demand and, therefore, asked engineers and other stakeholders to avoid the adoption of the piecemeal approach to resolving energy challenges.
Mr Amissah-Arthur made the remark when he opened the 2016 annual meeting of the Association of Power Utilities of Africa (APUA) in Accra yesterday.
The three-day conference, which has the theme: “Energy development through customer management, revenue collection and energy efficiency”, brought together people in the power sector from 56 African countries.
The conference is hosted by the Volta River Authority (VRA), the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo), the Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCO), the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and the Ministry of Power.
Energy gap
Mr Amissah-Arthur said there was an increasing energy gap whose implications did not affect only economic growth but also progress in all socio-economic sectors.
In the last decade, for instance, he said Africa’s power consumption had increased three times the rate of capacity growth.
To address the challenges, he suggested that a planned comprehensive approach that would embrace all sources of power, including thermal, hydro and renewable, must be developed and adopted.
In addition, he said, power producers must recognise the fact that customers’ expectations were rising and they were looking forward to reliable and affordable power, hence the need to engage them consistently to understand the issues.
Access to electricity
Concerning access to electricity in Ghana, Mr Amissah-Arthur said Ghana had been successful in expanding access of rural communities to electric power.
At the end of 2015, he said, access to electricity was 80.5 per cent, behind Gabon and South Africa on the continent.
He said the government had put in place measures such as the national energy strategy and self-help electrification projects to ensure that the government’s vision to achieve universal access to electricity by 2020 was achieved.
Africa must rise
The President of APUA, Mr Antonio Fernandes Rodrigues Belsa da Costa, in his address, said Africa needed to double up its efforts to find solutions to balance demand and supply in the power sector on the continent.
He said no community needed to be denied electricity which was a basic necessity, hence the need to work hard to ensure universal access to electric power.
VRA boss
In a welcome address, the Chief Executive Officer of the VRA, Mr Kirk Cofie, said most power sectors in some parts of Africa were confronted with challenges such as low accessibility, insufficiency, poor reliability and high tariffs.
The annual meeting, he said, was, therefore, to deliberate on best practices and strategies that were critical for the success and growth of the power sector on the continent.
He noted that Ghana, in the last few years, had had its fair share of power crisis and that to avoid future occurrences, it pursued various rehabilitation projects for the expansion of its transmission and distribution of infrastructure.