President John Mahama has expressed confidence that Ghana would make it out of the current energy crisis it is experiencing.
According to the President, some key power plants in the country will soon be back on stream to compliment the ones in operation.
The President made the announcement on Tuesday after touring the Sunon Asogli Power Plant, the Cenit Thermal Power Plant and the VRA Thermal Plant all located at Kpone near Tema.
He said thermal is set to be Ghana’s most reliable energy source in the future due to the failures from hydropower.
“Asogli has been in being for about a week, and that is what has increased the stress we face in terms of being able to supply enough load to Ghanaians. Happily, they’ve brought half of it back on stream and they are expecting that they complete the repairs so by next week we can get the full Asogli plant. We also visited the Cenit plant to see how things are going on there. They were doing maintenance and repairs, happily they are almost finished.”
He added that “I understand how Ghanaians feel in terms of the inconvenience we are going through with the current load management that we are having but I must say that I’m confident about the future because the generation planning that we are doing, we should be able to avoid finding ourselves in this kind of situation again.”
Meanwhile, the Project Manager at the VRA Thermal Plant, Francis Yaw Agbenyo told Citi News that the company is cash strapped in the execution of the project.
“We need about 2o million Euros to complete the project. We started the construction work way back in 2012 and we are currently at the pre-commissioning state. We had a challenge with finance and if we are able to get the finance today we can finish during the second quarter of the year. We are working to get some funds from the banks but we are getting challenges. 220 megawatts is like the power that is required to take care of half of Accra.”
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By: Godwin Allotey Akweiteh & Umaru Sanda/citifmonline.com/Ghana