The Minister of Energy, Dr Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, has rallied investors and development partners to explore the opportunities in the country’s energy sector to help mobilise resources to achieve its climate change targets.

He said the opportunities existed in utility-scale, distributed generation, mini-grid, and off-grid renewable energy based-electrification systems, clean cooking including promotion and distribution of Liquefied Petroleum Gas, biomass end-user technologies and improve biomass cookstoves.

“Ghana is positioned to partner prospective investors to scale up its renewable energy penetration with respect to remote off-grid communities as part of the last mile electrification”, he said yesterday at the Ghana Energy Day in Glasgow, Scotland.

The event, held at the country’s pavilion at the ongoing 26 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 26), was to showcase the country’s climate actions in the energy sector.

Dr Opoku-Prempeh said the country’s commitment to achieving its Nationally Determined Contributions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, under the Paris Agreement, was unwavering.

Efforts in the energy sector, he said, had become critical because it was a crucial global issue for discussion from industrialisation, social and economic development and climate change viewpoints.

Ghana, he said, remained resolute in its obligation to the Sustainable Development Goal 7 goal to achieve universal access to electrification by 2025 through the development of an eco-friendly energy supply chain, double access to clean cooking fuels and technologies.

He said the country had made modest progress in many areas of the energy sector including the achievement of a national electricity access rate of 86.63 per cent by the end of the third quarter of 2021.

He said 120MWe (Megawatt electric) grid-connected installed solar PV capacity representing 2.4 per cent renewable energy had been achieved in the national generation mix.

“Our aim is to reach 10 per cent renewable energy in the generation mix by 2030 as part of the Mitigation Programmes of Action in line with the Conference of Parties contribution”, he said.

Dr Opoku-Prempeh said the government had created the first-ever renewable energy park in the sub-region which has the capacity to hold up to about 650MWe capacity at Bui with the potential for up to 250MWe solar PV plant which would be hybridised with the existing Bui 400MW hydropower plant.

He also mentioned that the government had retrofitted existing crude oil-based simple cycle thermal plants into combined-cycle plants fuelled by natural gas to double energy efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

He mentioned the appliance standards and labelling regime, mainstreaming of mini-grid electrification into the national electrification scheme, and development of about 100 mini-grids with support from the Climate Investment Fund and other development partners, as successes being chalked.

With energy for cooking in households accounting for more than 35 per cent of the total energy supply, he said, the government was restructuring the clean cooking sector to attract innovative climate financing for its sustainable development.

FROM JONATHAN DONKOR, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND