Cape Town To Produce Its Own Electricity, Can Ghana Do Same?

Since 1982, Ghana has suffered intermittent electricity outages popularly known as “dumsor.” Electricity distributors usually practice load shedding or rolling blackouts, where some areas are required to live off light, for 12 hours or extremely, 24 hours. Power suppliers say such occurrences are caused by insufficient generation capacity or inadequate transmission infrastructure but, how long they are planning to go by such reasons is unknown.

Meanwhile, the sun gives off more energy than we will ever need. Yet, we are not harnessing it. Solar energy can help the country provide millions of megawatts than the 2400 megawatts we are barely generating. If only we will combine human capacity with technologies, we can generate a clean, inexpensive, renewable power to meet the nation’s demand.

Presently, South Africa’s second-biggest city Cape Town is seeking to secure more than 450 megawatts of power from renewable sources to cut reliance on state power utility Eskom Holdings. Their attempt will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The city is looking at a range of options and expects the bulk of the electricity to be generated from solar plants, Kadri Nassiep, the city’s executive director of energy and climate change, said in an interview.

On July 14 the city of 4.6 million people released a request for information to seek funding to build its own plants. This month or next it will seek proposals for the provision of as much as 150 megawatts from privately-owned plants to be built and operated within the city, he said. As much as 300 megawatts may also be purchased at a later stage from plants outside of Cape Town, according to Nassiep.