The Government of Ghana attaches great importance to the thematic complex of Renewable Energy (RE) with regard to climate relevance and sustainability and is therefore greatly interested in promoting and integrating them into the energy supply system. In 2010 the Ghanaian Government set itself the strategic goal of generating 10 % of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020. The Government also seeks to transfer various RE technologies to Ghana, developing expertise and developing the market for RE in the country. RE electricity generation is to become part of the overall power system. Ghana’s Renewable Energy Act (Act 832) came into force in 2011 to support the creation of the necessary framework for the promotion of renewable energy in Ghana, and to accelerate the effective integration of renewable energy in the national energy mix. Subsequently, GIZ initiated a 2-year project “Capacity for the Successful Implementation of the Renewable Energy Act (C-SIREA)” in 2013 to support Ghanaian institutions in the implementation of the Renewable Energy Act by providing technical assistance on the formulation of appropriate strategies and the creation of the necessary political, institutional and administrative framework with the relevant institutions. In April 2015, the first phase of the project was extended by one additional year.
Phase two of the project will run from 2016 to 2019 and its principal areas of activity are:
1) Grid integration of larger, grid-connected renewable energy facilitated by international competitive tendering and RE purchase obligations;
2) integration of decentralized, grid-connected renewable energy using the instrument net-metering; and
3) promotion of energy efficiency for end-users/households.
The first and second areas of activity will support the Ministry of Power, the relevant technical and financial regulatory authorities (Energy Commission-EC and Public Utilities Regulatory Commission-PURC), public utilities for electricity generation, transmission and distribution (ECG, NEDCo, VRA and GRIDCo) and bulk electricity customers during the implementation of the integration of renewable energy into the national grid through necessary capacity building.
Under phase one of the C-SIREA programme, GIZ among other activities looked at optimized national vRE integration pathways for Ghana, asking the question, where, when and how much vRE can be integrated, and the consequences of growing vRE shares with regard to benefits, grid bottlenecks, and optimal distribution over time and space. The multi-dimensional approach employed established the existence of many optimized pathways for the integration of vRE in Ghana.
The approach employed showed that the same fundamental economic, financial and political goal functions that are used successfully for standard power system planning can be applied to vRE deployment. Rather than the usual ‘technology push’ measures used to promote vREs, such as capital subsidies, GIZ believes vREs need to be analyzed holistically as an integral part of the national energy system and its growth in time and space, by applying methods which readily fit the toolkit already used by dispatchers, regulators and utilities.
Through the firm of consultants, GIZ seeks to:
(a) Determine best options for integration of variable renewable energies (vRE) into Ghana’s electricity network;
(b) Improve the planning capacity of local experts at Ministry of Power, Energy Commission, PURC, the distribution utilities (ECG & NEDCo) and the Ghana Grid Company (Gridco) in the area of grid impact simulation;
(c) Support the development of a long-term strategy for grid integration of vRE as part of Ghana’s RE agenda and general electricity generation;
(d) Assist Energy Commission, Ministry of Power and PURC to develop strategies to expedite and optimize the integration of vRE into the national grid;
(e) Propose and assist the Government of Ghana with relevant policy options.
