Unraveling the underlying mechanisms : a coevolutionary narrative of Ghana’s electricity system and the barriers to solar energy contributing to the national grid

Sammanfattning: Academic literatures state that the inadequacy of political will, lack of financial incentives, high costs of renewables, low awareness, and prominence of thermal sources is creating barriers to the adoption of renewable energy, despite the favorable environmental conditions for them in Ghana, especially solar. Within the context of sustainability, understanding the mechanisms that have produced these barriers can improve the possibility of identifying pathways to increasing the use of renewable energy in powering development. The importance of identifying pathways is crucial in aiding developing countries, like Ghana, avoid the same high-carbon growth trajectories in the energy sector. Applying an originally designed coevolutionary framework to the case study of Ghana’s modern electricity system, this paper looks to unravel the underlying mechanisms that have produced the barriers to solar energy’s uptake on Ghana’s national grid. Coevolution is understood as the interdependencies and feedbacks of the electricity system set within and between political, economic, cultural, and biophysical factors. By creating a coevolutionary narrative of Ghana’s electricity system the multidimensional integrated factors that have shaped the electricity system were identified. The historic mechanisms responsible for these developments were reinterpreted to understand their relation to the current barriers to solar energy contributing more as a primary energy source. To do this a document analysis of historic archival data and other materials on Ghana’s electricity system was conducted and supplemented with interviews with key personal within the electricity sector. It seems that coevolutions stretching from the construction of the Akosombo Dam, Ghana’s first power plant, through the periods of power crisis then power sector liberalization in the 1990s-2000s, to the recent discovery of oil and gas have fostered interdependencies and feedbacks which have greatly contributed to the current conditions prohibiting uptake of solar energy. Particularly, these underlying socio-ecological historical mechanisms have produced the barriers of lack of political will, high costs of solar energy, and prominence of thermal sources.