A STUDY ON Electricity End Use SAVING POTENTIALS in Residential and Commercial Buildings in Ghana

摘要

The modern civilization into which our lives centre depends on a variety of energy sources for its very existence. Energy use is a basic necessity for all human livelihood and development. It can change the way people live and their daily routine of activities. Interestingly, Some 1.6 billion people, almost a third of the world´s population have no access to electricity or to other modern forms of energy supply 80% of these people can be found in rural areas of developing countries especially in Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia Apart from the issues with global warming and global climate change, there are other environmental issues that we should be concerned with. These include acid rain, resource depletion, environmental degradation and desertification etc. The burning of coal and other fuels containing sulphur by power plants produces sulphur which reacts with water vapour and becomes acid. The acid in the atmosphere may combine with dust or rain water and can have very adverse effects on plants, animals and even human life There is hardly a place on earth where energy is not getting more expensive. Not only the cost of gasoline, but also the bills for heating oil and electricity are going up. All of us would welcome a solution a real solution to the rising cost of energy. In recent years energy conservation and efficiency have emerge as one of the options for achieving this goal. Energy end use efficiency makes us less dependent on energy and also saving us cost of electric usage and most importantly protecting the environment. There is no doubt many develop countries have perused this over the years in improving the energy services in various sectors. The figure 1.2 below shows how countries in OECD have been improving their gross domestic product with necessarily increasing their energy demands. The study established two key issues with Ghana’s electricity consumption. The first is that, Ghana is faced with quantity demand and supply gap, ie insufficient electricity generation capacity to meet nationwide demand. And the second is that the country is comfronted with inefficiencies in both the supply and demand side of electric power generation. To conclude on the formulated problem, the report showed that there pursuing electricity end use efficiency in the residential and commercial sectors in Ghana holds interesting possibilities of adding to the electricity demands in the country by adding to the grid the saved otherwise would been wasted electricity with no environmental cost to the nation. However, demand side managent can only work to an extent, no matter the levels of demand side measures Ghana pursues, we will still need electric power to operate “our efficient” end user appliance. This means that, demand side management should used and adopted together with other measures to ensure Ghana achieves her goals of becoming a middle income country by 2020.