By Justina Paaga
Takoradi, May 15, GNA- Karpowership Ghana Company LTD, under its corporate social responsibility has initiated more than 17 projects and awarded scholarships to brilliant, but needy students in the past eight years.
The projects are under, good health and wellbeing, quality education, gender equality, affordable and clean energy, decent works and economic growth, industry, innovation and infrastructure and sustainable cities and communities.
The rest are, clean water and Sanitation, reduce inequalities, peace and strong institutions, partnerships for goals, life on land, life below water, climate action, no poverty, zero hunger responsible consumption and production.
Ms Sandra Amarquaye Corporate Communications Manager Karpowership Ghana, said this during an engagement in Takoradi to update the media on their operations within and outside Ghana, environmental compliance measures, Karpowership CRS activities /projects and Stakeholder Engagement and to seek feedback from the media on stakeholder concerns.
She said since 2015 they had undertaken various corporate social responsibility activities focused on bringing some sustainable development goals into reality.
“As an organization, our aim is to contribute directly or indirectly to all the goals starting with providing clean and affordable energy that we believe will support the sustainable growth and development of all economies”.
Under gender equality, quality education and good health and well-being, she said the company had instituted a scholarship scheme that was paying fees for 21 brilliant, but needy students of the Engineering Department at Takoradi Technical University (TTU).
She said Karpowership marked International Day of Education with UNESCO at the Applied Technology Institute in Accra, mentorship for students in their fallout communities and refurbished a preschool, built an ICT Lab and refurbished schools in their catchment areas.
Ms Amarquaye said under the company’s girl power project, the Company organized a skills training programme for female students at the Accra girls’ senior high school, donated items to fishmongers, a mentorship programme for 10 basic and senior high schools from Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis and commemorated International Women’s Day with an all-female tour with the Engineering students of TTU.
She said they also held an empowerment training for fisher folks in collaboration with the fisheries commission, teamed up with their community of operations for intermittent cleanup exercises, yearly donations to Muslim and Christian communities and yearly tree planting exercises under the Green Ghana project.
For her part, Ms Michelle Hazel Project Manager of Karpowership Ghana explained that they signed a power purchase agreement with the electricity company of Ghana in June 2014 to supply 450MW to Ghanaians and that 235mw power ship began commercial operations in December of the same year to supply affordable electricity to help resolve power outages (Dumsor).
She said in August 2017, Karpowership deployed a 470MW power ship, the largest in the world, to replace the 235 MW power ship and began operations in September 2017, a month after its arrival in Ghana.
Ms Hazel said in August 2019, the 470 MW power ship was relocated to the Western enclave to utilize the country’s indigenous natural gas, adding that the project since its inception had affected both the micro and macro economies of the fallout communities and country in general.
She said under micro benefits more than $3 million of direct investment was put into site preparation and hiring of subcontractors for daily operation, employment to locals, social interventions, capacity building as well as technology transfer.
While on the Macro benefits, Ms Hazel said there had been a base load plant of 470MW to the national grid, off-take of Ghana’s indigenous natural gas to meet the government’s upstream commercial obligations and spent $8 million to pre-finance the construction of the transmission lines.
She said Karpowership currently operated in three continents and 15 countries and had diversified high growth and was a unique power generation enterprise with minimal use of land.
She said the Company had 2,500 employees from 21 different countries and had created more than 10,000 jobs around the world, noting that the company operated under an environmentally friendly atmosphere utilizing state-of-the-art technology delivering a tangible instrument of change for migration to cleaner fuels and embracing all international HSE regulations and global best practices.
Mr Hazel said Karpowership was operational in seven countries in West Africa (Ghana, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Senegal and Ivory Coast), stressing that, “Africa is home to 17 per cent of the world’s population, but it accounts for only 4 per cent of global power supply investment, it is estimated that only 48.8 per cent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population had access to electricity. “
Powership is a floating power plant, either propelled or barge mounted, operating on both natural gas / LNG and heavy fuel oil, providing the most competitive all-in cost of electricity and can be delivered in 3-6 months ready to generate electricity.
GNA