Renewable Energy Planning and Regulatory Policy: Tools for Sustainable Electricity Generation and Low Carbon Development. The Case of Ghana

Abstract

Renewable energy is very key to the development of Ghana especially for the replacement of fossil fuels which have become much a talk globally for contributing to climate change. Unfortunately, the country has seen little development and deployment in renewable energy (RE) sector mainly due the numerous challenges/obstacles hindering the growth of the sector. Therefore, there is the need to identify these obstacles and find possible mitigation measures for the development of the sector. The study therefore employed a desktop analysis of the literature, survey approach and collected data from RE developers and stakeholders and using Long Range Energy Alternative Planning (LEAP) for modeling the GHG emission. This study based on the survey collected on identified obstacles, ranked them from most notable to least notable to be addressed if the country needs to develop the RE sector. The average score to obstacles ranged from 4.13 to 2.52 and the overall average score was 3.17 indicating that all the selected barriers are key to the development of RE in Ghana. The study shows that, the most challenging obstacles include cost of financing high interest rate, lack/insufficient incentives (tax rebate, grants etc), lack/inadequate access to finance and long-term capital, grid connection constraints and lack of grid capacity, instability of the local currency (currency fluctuations), insufficient technical know-how for the operation and maintenance of RET. The study also reveals that RE is capable of driving Ghana to a low carbon economy if attention is giving to the development and deployment of renewable energy resources for electricity generation and utilization. Greenhouse Gas emissions from Business as Usual (BAU) of 72,543.8 Mt-CO2eq will decrease by 11.5%, 57.7% and 80.8% by 2030 if fossil fuels are replaced with 10%, 20%, and 40% RE respectively into the current generation mix. Thus, Ghana can achieve its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) plan of unconditionally lowering its GHG emissions by 15% relative to BAU by a little over 10% RE replacement in the electricity sector, whiles the conditional 45% can be achieved in the electricity sector with a little less than 20% RE replacement.