Interview: Total Petroleum to invest 80 mln USD in Ghana's solar energy farms

French lubricant giants Total Petroleum says it will from this year invest between 80 million U. S. dollars and 100 million dollars in solar energy farms in Ghana.

It has therefore formed a consortium with renewable energy experts, Neoen, to implement the solar power project in Ghana.

Frédéric Ciamous, Senior Business Development Manager at the New Energies Division of Total, disclosed this exclusively to Xinhua on Tuesday on the sides of the three-day West Africa Clean Energy and Environment (WACEE) conference and Exhibition.

According to him, there will be two solar farms built over a two-year period to provide 20 Mega Watts each of grid power for Ghana.

"There is the need to aggregate some critical skills sets in order to make this possible. That is the reason we formed the consortium with Neoen who have capacity in such skills in order to make the project a success," Ciamous explained.

Each of the solar farms, which will be located in northern Ghana, will cost between 40 million dollars and 50 million dollars.

The investment is going to be made by Total Petroleum and Neoen as well as some international project financing institutions, including the World Bank.

Ghana government targets to increase the country's total installed capacity to 5000 MW by 2017 from the current 2,840 MW. In addition, it will like to have a 10 percent renewable energy in the total generation mix.

"We expect the project to be constructed and commissioned by 2017. As soon as we receive the approval from government, everything will be constructed and commissioned within these two years," the official told Xinhua ahead of the official announcement slated for Wednesday.

He added that the project would deploy Sunpower Oasis Power Plant technology in the construction of the facility.

Till date, Sunppower has 1.5 Giga Watts (1.5 GW) of installed capacity across the world, and only last month commissioned a 70 MW for Total and its partners, Etrion and Solventus in Chile.

Stéphane Diop, International Development Manager for Neoen, said there would be a team of trained engineers and spare parts on hand to deal with any hitches in the operation of the solar system once it was commissioned.

According to him, since solar panels operate as modular units with each model operating on its own, a problem with one unit will not affect the operation of the rest of the system.

"Solar panels are much less complicated than gas fired systems such as thermals and so power outages due to equipment breakdown are also minimal," Diop stated.

The West African cocoa, gold and oil exporter has been experiencing serious power hiccups from 2012 but this has reached acute levels since January with the breakdown of some of the thermal plants and a low inflow of water into the hydro power dams.

This has forced the power distributor, the Electricity Company of Ghana, to shed at least 660 MW of power daily, limiting consumers to a 12-hour power supply, followed by a 24 hour shutdown schedule. Endi