GHANA: September 25, 2008


ACCRA - West African legislators worried by climate change and soaring energy costs want regional leaders to back plans to harness sun and wind energy that experts say could bring electricity to some of the poorest people on earth.


NASA scientists have identified a site in the Sahara desert in northern Niger as the sunniest piece of land in the world.

"We have the natural resource -- enough sunshine that can supply our total power requirements," Kwame Ampofo, an energy expert and a member of Ghana's parliament, told Reuters late on Tuesday after legislators from the region discussed the project.

The meeting, held in electricity-hungry Ghana beside one of the biggest hydropower lakes in the world, urged regional leaders to form a West African Renewable Energy Community to promote sustainable power projects.

West Africa's richest country, Nigeria, is the continent's top oil producer but many of its people lack reliable power. Sub-Saharan Africans have the lowest average power consumption in the world, and just one in four have access to electricity.

High oil prices, which rose by more than 57 percent during 2007 and peaked at a record high of more than US$147 a barrel in July, have pushed up costs for oil- and gas-fired power stations, driving inflation and stretching state budgets.

"The crisis is derailing national efforts at poverty reduction," Ampofo said.

"It is throwing our development targets out of gear and we need to start thinking seriously about renewable energy."

West Africa's arid hinterlands and some of its Atlantic coast cities, many of them built on lagoons, stand to suffer more than most from global warming, erratic weather patterns and rising seas, climatologists predict.


SUN IN THE SAHARA

One of the main projects proposed at the Ghana meeting would use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and boil water to drive electrogenic turbines.

The US space agency NASA says the sunniest spot on land is in northern Niger -- the sunniest part of the planet being in the Pacific Ocean, less practical for solar projects.

"This form of power generation could serve the populous coastal regions well, if connected to the northern parts of West Africa, where there are desert areas with good solar radiation for much of the year," Gerhard Knies, a German physicist who presented the project to the Ghana meeting, said in a statement.

"This technology has been shown to work and is in operation in Spain and the United States. Above all, it does not pollute, is inexhaustible and will not be subject to rising fuel costs," said Knies, whose country is planning solar projects in Algeria.

A closing declaration from the meeting at the Akosombo Dam on the 250-mile (400 km) long Lake Volta called for a feasibility study to address technical, economic, financial and political aspects of the clean energy project.

Legislators also agreed to push countries across the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to pass a special funding tariff law to ensure investors in renewable energy projects could recoup the high investment costs -- a major obstacle to clean energy projects. (Additional reporting by Alistair Thomson in Dakar; Editing by Janet Lawrence)


Story by Kwasi Kpodo


REUTERS NEWS SERVICE