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The one megawatt (MW) solar facility for the Dawhenya Irrigation Scheme in the Greater Accra Region is expected to boost the nation’s renewable energy stock from 3.5 per cent to 5.2 per cent by next year.
Its completion is expected to push the nation closer to achieving a renewable energy target of 10 per cent by 2030 and it will be a significant effort to improve the highest productive uses of the nation's energy resources.
The Minister of State at the Ministry of Energy, Herbert Krapa, made this known at a knowledge-sharing seminar in Accra last Wednesday on the project, dubbed “Water-Energy-Food Nexus Programme."
The solar facility is being supported by the Korean government under a $5 million energy component of a $30 million grant facility provided to the government of Ghana through the Korean Official Development Assistance (KODA), with funding from the Korean Association of Machinery Industry (KOAMI) and the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KAIT).
The two Korean institutions are collaborating with Ghana's Ministries of Energy and Finance, the Ghana Irrigation Development Authority (GIDA) under the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), the Energy Commission and the Electricity Company of Ghana to implement the project.
It is being built to provide adequate and reliable power supply for irrigation purposes, particularly regular water supply, to support beneficiary farmers to produce more at a cheaper cost throughout the year.
Mr Krapa stated that the facility would also help the nation to increase its agricultural output, food security and ensure sustainable water management while accelerating the government's flagship programme, Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ).
The goal of the project, Mr Krapa explained, was to ensure that the nation integrated cleaner and greener sustainable energy sources into the productive sectors of its economy, and more directly, utilising cleaner sources of energy to power irrigation systems for agricultural production in Ghana.
“This project is a demonstration of how cross-cutting approaches and inter-institutional collaboration can help solve different challenges in a coherent manner and bring development and prosperity to a broader group of people at once,” he added.
Mr Krapa said the moratorium on distributed renewable energy had been lifted, paving the way for the launch of the Net Metre Renewable Energy Programme.
“We have consequently rolled out the government-built solar project with €22 million funding by KfW, a German international organisation that works together with its partners in developing countries to promote sustainable development, and also rolled out the 12,000 Net-Metre solar photovoltaic (PV) project as part of the $85 million state-of-the-art Renewable Energy Programme, to promote productive uses of energy and increase our country's renewable energy stock,” he stated.
The Director of Korea Programme of International Agriculture (KOPIA), Dr Choong-Hoe Kim, said the organisation has been partnering other institutions in Korea to ensure smooth implementation of the project.
He announced that the Korean government was investing $27 million over the next five years to boost rice production, including providing 100 hectares of mechanised irrigated farmland to produce 5,000 tons of quality rice seeds for distribution to beneficiary rice farmers in the country.
The Executive Vice-Chairman of KOAMI, Kap Seok Yoon, pledged that the Koreans would use the project to secure additional financing to fund new projects, including landfill gas for power generation and mini grid electrification schemes, to contribute to the “last mile electrification target.”
The Project Coordinator and Head of Renewables at the Ministry of Energy, Seth Mahu, for his part, gave an overview of the energy sector in the country and stressed that the nation's quest to increase its renewable energy sources was on course with a number of ongoing projects to scale up the sector.
He said the project would enhance research and development in the water-energy-food ecosystems and build the needed human and institutional capacities to ensure effective operation and management, and overall sustainability of the facility.
