Dr. Kwabena Donkor, a former minister of power in the Mahama administration, is pleading with the government to prioritise exporting extra electricity to nearby nations in order to reduce the enormous debt that is strangling the energy industry.
Donkor said that rather than blaming the Mahama administration for the onerous debts brought on by poorly thought-out power purchase agreements, the government should concentrate on aggressively exploiting its excess capacity.
“If you look at the export to Burkina, our 330 megawatts fit into their 25 megawatts, and it is already in place and the infrastructure is already there. Now we need to aggressively sell.”
Mr. Donkor also cautioned the administration to use the current infrastructure to export goods to nations besides Burkina Faso, such as Mali.
“Instead of complaining about the excess capacity, we are unable to meet the demand of Burkina. There is Mali beyond Burkina and there is already interconnection and so there is a need for a policy drive. Right from 2012, the intention was to make Ghana a major exporter of power and we have exported power since the late 1960s and 1970s to Togo and Benin but we want to go beyond that and we want to be a major power exporter.”
