Ghana puts brakes on utility-scale solar with temporary cap of 150MW – Report

Ghana has put the brakes on its utility-scale solar market by establishing a temporary cap of 150MW, according to a report by PV Tech.

The publication indicates that individual projects seeking for support under Ghana’s solar feed-in tariff (FiT) are to be restricted to a maximum of 20MW within that overall limit until the country’s first large PV projects are built and their impact on its grid assessed.

The country was forced to introduce the cap after being overwhelmed with applications for generation licences under the country’s fledgling feed-in tariff programme.

John Jinapor, the deputy minister for power, was quoted to have said at the ongoing Solar & Off-Grid Renewables West Africa conference in Ghana’s capital, Accra that he was encouraged by the “overwhelming interest” among investors in utility-scale solar in Ghana, but said the imposition of restrictions had been made necessary to “maintain the integrity of the national grid”.

He said the 150MW cap would be in place for the “short to medium term” for PV projects not incorporating grid stability or storage measures. Individual projects will be restricted to 20MW for the main Ghana GridCo transmission network or 10MW for distribution network projects.

Interest in the FiT, introduced under Ghana’s 2011 renewable energy, was such that a pipeline of applications soon built up to 29 projects totalling some 2,155MW. But that level of deployment was soon revealed to be far more than Ghana’s limited grid was capable of handling, the report noted.

By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi