By Lawrence Odoom/Phalonzy
President John Dramani Mahama has proclaimed that Government will, before the year’s end, perform the ceremonial sod-cutting for a monumental 1,200-megawatt electricity generation facility, a cornerstone initiative engineered to expand Ghana’s generation portfolio and preempt the nation’s burgeoning energy appetite.
The President emphasized that the project constitutes a pivotal pillar in a broader strategic framework designed to inoculate Ghana’s power architecture against supply shortfalls and to institutionalize critical redundancy within the national grid.
Speaking at the Resetting Ghana Citizen Engagement in Koforidua on Saturday, May 2, President Mahama observed that Ghana’s peak electricity consumption has ascended sharply, catalyzed by a surge in investment and intensified economic dynamism.
“Looking at how the country is growing, the consumption of electricity is growing. When we came to power, the consumption was 3,500 megawatts but currently the consumption at peak has gotten to 4,300 megawatts and that is because there is more investment in town and that demand for electricity has become high, so meaning we have to add more generation so that we can get redundancy,”he asserted.
He revealed that the Ministries of Energy and Finance have meticulously crafted a comprehensive roadmap to operationalize the undertaking. Beyond consolidating domestic supply, the President accentuated that excess power from the plant could be channeled to neighboring jurisdictions, including Burkina Faso, thereby yielding strategic foreign exchange inflows for the Republic.
“By God’s grace, this year we will cut sod for its commencement,” he declared.