Ghana will supply Burkina Faso with 100MW of electricity daily after completion of the 225kva Bolgatanga-Ouaguadougou interconnection project, William Owuraku Aidoo, a Deputy Minister of Energy, has said.
Ghana has been supplying power to Burkina Faso, albeit in smaller quantities, since 2003; moving up from 0.5MW to 9.2MW in 2013. However, Burkina Faso has requested a further increase in power supply as part of its developmental plans.
“Now, it’s got to a point that the good people of Burkina Faso have decided to embark on a developmental agenda and Ghana has agreed to supply power to the tune of 100MW in total to Burkina Faso,” the Deputy Minister, who is in charge of power, said.
“We’ve started by installing transmission lines from Bolgatanga to Burkina, to start with, that will supply power in the region of 50MW” he added.
A second transmission line from Aboadze, through Kumasi to Bolgatanga, will carry the second installment of 50MW to Burkina Faso and is expected to be completed by early 2018.
The minister made this known when a Burkinabe delegation, led by that country’s Minster of Energy, Professor Alfa Oumar Diss, paid a courtesy call on him at his office. The visit, among other things, was to discuss the status of the 225kV Bolgatanga –Ouagadougou Project, which is part of the West African Power Pool Project (WAPP), expected to create a power grid system across West Africa.
William Owuraku Aidoo also revealed that the two sides held discussions around the extension of a petroleum pipeline from Buipe in the Northern Region to Bingo in Burkina Faso.
If constructed, the pipeline, will help curb the problem of smuggling by transporting finished petroleum products directly to Burkina Faso.
Minister of Energy for Burkina Faso explained that the increase in purchase of power from Ghana was synonymous to his country’s development agenda and that the construction of transmission lines, is part of a regulatory framework to ensure the efficient transfer of power or energy exchange between West African countries as is done in some European countries.
“Burkina Faso is developing solar and maybe in 10years, we can have excess energy in the day which we can also bring to Ghana,” he said.
Alfa Oumar Diss also revealed plans to construct a second dam on the Bagre river, to help resolve the problem of flooding that affects Ghanaian farmers along the White Volta basin.
He said the Bagre dam was poorly designed and therefore could not fully solve the problem of flooding during spillage from over capacity.
“We have the first dam of 16MW which was under-designed such that the extra water discharged to Ghana is more than that remaining in the dam, disturbing farmers in Ghana,” he said.
He was optimistic that, with the construction of a second dam, the perennial flooding will be resolved and Burkina Faso can also increase its power supply as a result.
The flooding of towns along the White Volta in Ghana has been an issue of grave concern as lives and property have been lost in the past. Areas worst affected by the flooding over the years include Savelugu Nanton, Tolon, Kumbungu and West Mamprusi.
As part of the visit, Alfa Oumar Dissa and his Burkinabe delegation also visited the project site of the 225kV transmission lines to inspect the state of work on the WAPP project.
The 225 kV Bolgatanga (Ghana) – Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) Interconnection project is a trans-boundary electric power transmission line to emanate from Bolgatanga in Ghana to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. It involves the construction of approximately 200 kilometers of simple circuit transmission lines to export energy from Ghana to Burkina Faso.
