Ghana’s response to previous power shortfalls has followed a consistent pattern: add thermal generation capacity, typically gas-fired, until installed capacity comfortably exceeds peak demand, and treat the crisis as solved. This has worked in the narrow sense that the lights have generally stayed on since the last major “dumsor” period, but it has left the country with a generation mix that is heavily exposed to a single set of risks — gas supply reliability, international fuel pricing, and the foreign-currency cost of both — rather than a genuinely diversified and resilient system.
Our position is that energy security planning should be built around exposure diversification, not headline capacity margin. Concretely, this means treating thermal conversions such as the Kpone plant’s move to combined-cycle gas turbine operation as a bridging step that improves the efficiency of existing gas-fired capacity, rather than as the end state of the strategy — paired with a binding, published timetable for growing hydro, solar, and other renewable capacity as a share of the mix, and for firming up the domestic gas supply chain so that generation is not repeatedly exposed to the same import and pricing shocks. We would also argue for demand-side forecasting to be built explicitly around Ghana’s industrial ambitions — the growth expected from initiatives such as One District, One Factory and from AfCFTA-linked manufacturing — rather than backward-looking demand trends, since under-forecasting industrial demand is what turns a comfortable capacity margin into the next shortfall.
None of this requires abandoning thermal generation, which will remain a necessary and useful part of the mix for years to come. It requires treating today’s adequate capacity margin as a planning window to diversify from, not as evidence that the underlying exposure has been resolved.
AFR