Challenges of renewable energy development and deployment in Ghana: perspectives from developers

Renewable energy is key to the development of Ghana's power sector especially for the replacement of fossil fuels, which have become much a talk globally for contributing to climate change. Unfortunately, Ghana has seen little development and deployment in the renewable energy sector mainly due to the numerous challenges/obstacles hindering the growth of the sector. Therefore, there is the need to identify these obstacles and find possible mitigation measures for the development of the sector. The study therefore employed a desktop analysis of the literature, survey approach and collected data from renewable energy developers and institutions. The study based on the survey collected data on identified obstacles, ranked them from most notable to least notable to be addressed if the country needs to develop the renewable energy sector. Evidence from the survey indicated that the average score to obstacles ranged from 4.13 to 2.52 on a scale of 0-5 and the overall average score was 3.17 indicating that all the selected barriers are key to the development of renewable energy in Ghana. The study shows that, the most challenging obstacles include; cost of financing high interest rate, lack/insufficient incentives (tax rebate, grants etc.), lack/inadequate access to finance and long-term capital, grid connection constraints and lack of grid capacity, instability of the local currency (currency fluctuations), insufficient technical know-how for the operation and maintenance of renewable energy technologies. Ghana has enough policies and regulations to overcome these challenges if they are well implemented and enforced. The survey conducted also looked at respondents' point of view on the most critical policy instruments for the development and deployment of renewable energy technologies in Ghana.