Build High-Capacity Wood Pellet Biomass Power Plants In Ghana

It has become increasingly difficult for ordinary households  to put up  with the never-ending power outages and escalating electricity prices in Ghana. The people of Ghana definitely  deserve better. Their patience is wearing thin by the day. Literally.

 Whether the problems  are systemic,  or result from sabotage by anti-regime elements working in the power sector - who are apparently doing the bidding of their political paymasters: according to the conspiracy theorists in our midst - the power sector's deficiencies need tackling. This is the 21st century, is it not?

Ghana cannot grow its economy and create jobs without reliable and sufficient electricity. That is why our ruling elites need to be a tad more imaginative in their approach to resolving the problem of inefficient electricity provision  for domestic and industrial usage in our country.

Faced with the spiralling cost of oil to fire its power plants - and in the  absence of a  more reliable source of natural gas - one wonders why the geniuses who manage the  Volta River Authority (VRA) are  not following the example of those who manage  the Drax coal-fired power plant near the UK town of  Selby.

 In April 2013, one of the Drax power plant's generating units,  was converted to biomass. Wood pellets are shipped across the Atlantic from the U.S. as feedstock for the converted biomass unit. That is an example wood pellet exporters from Ghana could emulate right across Europe - and help strengthen our currency in the process.

By 2016 the Drax power station will have a total of three units  running exclusively on  biomass. The coal-fired Drax plant supplies 7 percent of the UK's electricity. When it converts the total of 3 biomass plants by 2016, the Drax plant will burn 7 million tonnes of wood pellets a year.

If the VRA also had biomass power plants using wood pellets, could  plantations of fast-growing trees like teak not be planted up and down Ghana,  by District Assemblies, in partnership with private-sector entities,  to supply pellets to those  biomass power plants - creating a valuable supply-chain footprint  over much of  rural Ghana?

And would that not create worthwhile jobs for tens of thousands of  unemployed young people across the Ghanaian  countryside: who could drive trucks; legally fell trees with chainsaws in plantation thinning exercises; operate mobile wood pellet machines onsite in tree  plantations; sun-dry wood pellets; etc.  - and also  generate funds for development projects in cash-strapped district assemblies up and down Ghana?

The governent ought to float part of its 100 percent shareholding in the VRA on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) - and use the interest-free cash raised in the IPO to build biomass power plants.

That will be a more sustainable business model for the public-sector power generating utilities in an age of high oil prices and unreliable natural gas supply sources.

And at a time when hard-pressed electricity users in Ghana are fed up with ever-increasing power tariffs, it will lead to lower electricity prices and more reliable power generation by the VRA.

We need to start planning for the construction of  high-capacity wood pellet biomass power plants in Ghana. Today, not tomorrow. It is a perfect type of renewable energy for Ghana.

And now that  global climate change is negatively impacting our country, it is a low-carbon, clean-development power-sector  business model, which makes a great deal of sense for a largely agricultural country such as ours. One hopes our hard-of-hearing ruling elites  will listen to good advice,  offered freely,  for patriotic reasons, for once. A word to the wise...