Ing. Norbert Anku, former Director of Engineering at GRIDCO
A former Director of Engineering at the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo), Ing. Norbert Anku, has said that the nation’s grid infrastructure is well structured to integrate nuclear energy once the power is generated.
According to him, electricity integration is one of the mandates of GRIDCo and enough technology is available to support the grid integrate electricity from any source into the system.
For him, plans to incorporate nuclear into the country’s energy mix must be accelerated as it is long overdue. He believes this move will go a long way to assure the nation of cheap and consistent power going into the future.
“Ghana’s grid infrastructure is one with the most robust systems and outlay. It was constructed with the future in mind and positioned to be able to absorb power from any source – be it solar, hydro, thermal or nuclear. From where I stand and from what I know about our grid, nuclear can easily absorbed by the grid,” he said.
Nuclear is crucial to sustainable dev’t
To Ing. Anku, the time is now to secure sustainable power for industrialisation, and nuclear presents that option. “Now more than ever, the clarion call to industrialise is gaining momentum; and the best way to sustain this momentum is to get reliable power. And fortunately for us we have the opportunity to go nuclear, and the nation’s grid is strong enough to integrate the power and push it to industry for use,” Ing. Anku said.
He said that going nuclear is also “the only way to ensure low-priced power is served customers”.
Ghana’s current average tariff of 12.9 cents per kilowatt-hour for industrial consumers as of December 2020 is very high when compared with countries such as Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Malawi, Botswana, DR Congo, Mozambique, Zambia, Ethiopia – which all had cost of power at less than 10 cents per kilowatt-hour as at 2016. Worthy of note is that Ethiopia, as at 2016, charged 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour for consumers.