Govt challenged to make VALCO operational

AN energy consultant, Dr Goosie Tanoh, has challenged government to ensure the Volta Aluminium Company (VALCO) becomes fully operational.

According to him, VALCO stood the chance of potentially generating over $460 million in revenue annually, in view of the fact that aluminium was selling at $2,300 per ton on the world market.

“It is easy, therefore, to see the immediate financial gains Ghana can enjoy from a fully powered VALCO,” Dr Tanoh said.

He also threw a challenge to the government to tackle problems that had plagued the energy sector and develop realistic and systematic approaches that would solve the problems once and for all.

Dr Tanoh was speaking at the energy dialogue session on the second day of the ongoing Third Ghana Policy Fair.

The session, on the theme, “Meeting Ghana’s energy needs, current status and preparations for the future” brought together stakeholders in the power, petroleum and gas sector.

Dr Tanoh said if the company was made fully operational, it could provide  over 15,000 direct and indirect employment in the aluminium sector.

He said with the country’s population expected to increase to 29 million in 2015, demands in electricity consumption and usage were likely to swell above its expected growth rate.

Dr Tanoh was of the view that the erratic development of communities required that institutions responsible for power transmission and distribution ought to have adequate logistic capabilities to resolve power delivery problems.

“It, therefore, behoves on government to follow the example Nigeria, to make a gradual progress towards decentralisation of major government entities in the provision of power,” he said.

He said energy delivery was still fraught with disruption, while implementation of policies in that direction had also been slow.

He called for an intensified campaign to encourage investments in renewable energy by engaging independent power producers (IPPs) to partner metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs), to achieve the government’s target of integrating 10 per cent of renewable energy into the power generation sector by 2020.

The energy minister, Dr Joe Oteng Adjei, who delivered a paper on the government’s energy policy initiatives, announced that the Energy Commission has started a pilot programme on energy efficiency refrigerators.

That he said was in line with the new regulation framework geared towards ensuring that refrigerators being imported into the country complied with the new law.

He said the government had put in a place a comprehensive programme meant to make sure some 200 megawatts capacity of power was added to the national total capacity annually.

“The annual consumption growth demand of 16 per cent has spurred us to make investments in the sector to consolidate growth,” Dr Oteng Adjei said.

SOURCE: Della Russel Ocloo, Daily Graphic, April 17, 2012