Towards accelerating the deployment of decentralised renewable energy mini-grids in Ghana: Review and analysis of barriers

Abstract

There is growing acceptance that renewable energy mini-grids will play an integral role in the attainment of universal access to electricity as they are now considered to be least cost option for the electrification of locations far from the national grid. Yet, the pace of mini-grids deployment is tapered by multiple obstacles. The paper examined these barriers for Ghana, since a sizable proportion of the population without access to electricity today, will have to be electrified through mini-grids. By coupling literature reviews with field research, twentytwo barriers were identified and validated, dimensioned into political, economic, technical, social and environmental categories, and eventually ranked using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. The category results ranked political barriers as the most important obstacles (44.3%) and environmental as the least (6.4%). The overall results concentrate the top ten barriers around three main barrier categories; Political (5) Economic (3) and Technical (2), which makes up 70% of the collective barrier weight. Access to finance is accorded the greatest share of importance of 11.7% while limited paying capacity is assigned 3.88%. The paper argues that severe lack of funding, exacerbated by a policy that imposes unbearable subsidies, limits business model innovation, least support productive uses and dispels private capital investment, impedes accelerated deployment of mini-grids for timely universal access to electricity in Ghana. Modifications to the current policy are therefore required.