What Ghana's take-or-pay bill should have taught everyone
Contracting for capacity you cannot evacuate or sell is the most expensive mistake in African power. It keeps being repeated.
Editorial Desk · INFRA/CORE
AnalysisGhana contracted more generation capacity than its network could deliver or its consumers could pay for, on take-or-pay terms, in dollars. The excess-capacity charge has run into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually — paid for electricity never generated.
The mechanics were not exotic. Load-growth forecasts were optimistic, procurement was unsolicited rather than competitive, and there was no single institution with both the mandate and the data to say no. Each individual PPA was defensible. The portfolio was not.
The transferable lesson is about portfolio-level contracting discipline, and it applies with force to several markets currently in an aggressive procurement phase. Competitive tendering fixes price. It does not fix quantity.
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