A future Convention People’s Party (CPP) government will introduce wind energy to curtail the perennial power crisis in the country, the party’s flag bearer Ivor Greenstreet has said.
Speaking at a presidential debate organised by the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) and the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) in Accra on Wednesday 30 November, Mr Greenstreet said it was about time Ghana exploited the free gift of nature to its advantage.
He noted that just as was being planned by the United States and Korea, Ghana will follow suit and rely on renewable energy resources to solve the power crisis.
“Apart from the complex problems that exist at the moment in terms of the current infrastructure and how to maintain it and continue with it, we have a vision of the future and our vision revolves around renewable energy resources. If you look at the United States for instance, by 2030 they intend to have 20 per cent of their energy mix from wind. They are investing in the wind park in South Wyoming of a 1000 hectares with a 1000 wind turbines to produce 2000 megawatts of energy. South Korea intends to have about 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind power. And here in Ghana we are blessed and we must take advantage of the free gift of nature, and that is a wind corridor stretching 1000km. Studies indicate that it is the most reliable wind corridor over the whole of Africa and that it stretches along a parallel mountain range and the reason why we know there is so much wind there, apart from the studies, is that you regularly hear tidal waves which occur there and people putting stones on their roofs,” he stated.
Mr Greenstreet explained: “The reason there is wind, in fact over the entirety of the surface of the globe, is because the earth as you know sits on an axis and while on that axis revolves around 1040 miles per hour and orbits the sun at 67000 miles per hour. Therefore, there is wind all over the surface of the earth. We don’t feel it because of gravity. We will install 9900 turbines along that wind corridor, each generating three megawatts of power totalling 29,700 megawatts of power, and with a reduced wind outage to 66 per cent, we should be able to generate 9000 megawatts of energy over a period of time.”
Mr Greenstreet noted that producing wind energy will run into billions of dollars but can be done if Ghana adopts the production sharing formula as it’s done in Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, and Libya.
“The cost will be massive and run into billions. We have done our own study into how to fund it. We shall repeal the Petroleum Law recently passed in parliament, which institutes what’s called the Ghana Hybrid Royalty Taxes System for collecting revenue from the oil companies. Between the years 2010 [and] 2015, Ghana earned $3billion from this system of collecting royalties and taxes. We can’t even collect petty taxes from our own citizens… There is a far better system which is called the Production Sharing Formula utilised by other progressive African countries like Angola, Libya and Cote d’Ivoire. It is like owning a piece of land, somebody comes to grow corn on that land and you share in the proceeds from the corn,” he said.
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
