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Mr Richmond Owusu (left) explaining the point  to some staff of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and the MiDA team
Mr Richmond Owusu (left) explaining the point to some staff of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and the MiDA team

MiDA assists public institutions to cut electricity cost

The Millennium Development Authority (MiDA) is spearheading a $3-million project to replace high electricity consuming appliances in six public institutions with energy-efficient appliances.

The beneficiary institutions are the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH), the Adabraka Polyclinic, the University of Ghana, the Department of Urban Roads, and the Ministries of Education and Health.
The project would ensure significant cost saving on electricity and in the case of Korle Bu, the savings will amount to GH¢3.4 million a year.
Visit
A team from MiDA yesterday visited the KBTH, where four blocks made up of the Central Laboratory, the Accident and Emergency Department, the Child Health Department and the Department of Medicine are benefiting from the project.
Under the project, which is dubbed "Race to retrofit intervention", the four blocks are being retrofitted and all high electricity consuming appliances, including air conditioners, refrigerators, fans and bulbs are to be replaced with energy-efficient ones.
Ghana Compact
During the visit to the KBTH, the Project Engineer of Energy Efficiency and Demand Side Management (EEDSM) at MiDA, Ms Priscilla Adjei-Darko, said the project, a component of the Ghana Power Compact Programme with the Millennium Challenge Account, was aimed at promoting behavioural change and energy conservation practices.
She said it was also to ensure that state, private institutions and homes used energy-efficient appliances to encourage sustainable power consumption in the country.
As part of the project, Ms Adjei-Darko said MiDA obtained data from the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to ascertain which institutions were the top 20 high power consuming institutions in the Accra East and West regions of the electricity grid.
"We then wrote to the 20 institutions and informed them about this project and out of 20, only six responded," the project engineer explained.
A MiDA Project Manager for EEDSM at the Energy Commission, Mr Richmond Owusu, said as as part of the project, real-time energy monitoring systems would be installed in all the buildings to help the beneficiary institutions to undertake predictive maintenance of electrical appliances.
Ultimately, he said, the project would help drive down electricity tariffs and save cost for both the government and public consumers of electricity.
Mr Owusu said it was expected that the success of the retrofitted work in the six public institutions would serve as prototypes for the government to extend the exercise to other institutions when the project ended in March this year.
Benefits
The project consultant, Ms Faustina Afriyie, said an energy audit carried out showed that the four blocks in Korle Bu consumed 2.8 million kilowatts hour of power a year, but at the end of the project the hospital would save 40.2 per cent on power.
The saved power, representing 1.6 million kilowatts hour per year, she said, translated into savings of GH¢3.4 million a year for the hospital.
The Administrator of the Child Health Department, Ms Esther Tetteh, said "this is a total overhaul of our electrical system and it has enormous benefits".
Ms Afriyie said the department used medical equipment, which depended on air conditioners for optimum performance but "most of them are old and this leads to huge maintenance costs. They are also of different brands and getting spare parts for the brands has been difficult”.
“Now the uniformity of air conditioners will allow for easy maintenance and save cost. The fans that use to blow hot air are now blowing fresh air," she stated.

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