Former Chief Executive of the VRA, Dr. Charles Wereko Brobby is impressing on government, the need for competitive bidding among Independent Power Producers, IPP’s before signing power-generation agreements.  This, according to him has become crucial to ensure consumers enjoy lower tariffs.

He was speaking to JOY BUSINESS in response to recent suggestions by former British Diplomat, Craig Murray that the introduction of the IPP’s in Ghana's power sector is the cause of the current power crisis.

According Mr. Murray the electricity bills of Ghanaians go to provide profits to fat cat foreign corporations and the western banks that finance the IPP’s which provide less than 20% of electricity generation into the grid – yet scoop up over 60% of the revenues.

But Dr. Wereko Brobby says the lack of transparency in the power purchase agreements is rather to blame for the inefficiencies in the power sector. 

“The way we’ve done things in Ghana for probably the past ten years has been these unknown, completely obtuse and opaque power purchase agreements that are being signed between ECG and some international power companies. The principle of transparency has been abandoned in favour of these bilateral power purchase agreements which tend to cause trouble.

“However, if you do it in a fair and transparent manner and you put out a request for a certain capacity and you invite people to make proposals the likelihood is that you get quite a reasonable price for electricity,” he explained.

According to him, it would rather be necessary for government to revert to the initial regime where the system operator - in this case, GRIDCO rather than ECG signs and implements the power purchase agreements with the IPP’s.

“If you’re going to invite independent power producers into the country, you needed to make sure that the possibility of VRA dominating was excluded so that the independent power producers would feel that they have the same kind of terms to operate as VRA – which is what led first of all to the idea that GRIDCO should be decoupled from VRA and run as a system operator and what the system operator would do is that they would commission new generation plants and be the bulk wholesaler of power to ECG, NEDCo, the mines, etc. That is the system that is seemingly fair by IPP and power will be produced and sent out on the basis of least cost dispatch so if your power is cheap it would go out first and the next cheaper, and the next, and so on,” he concluded.