A REVIEW ON SOLAR ENERGY UTILIZATION IN GHANA

Abstract

The objective of the study was to review the barriers of the implementation of so-lar energy and solar home systems (SHS) in Ghana. This research focused on using financial mechanism such as subsidy as a means of promoting SHS and use the payback period to explore into off-grid solar home system (SHS) as an alternative source of energy. The research method included both literature review and case analysis of a house-holder in Ghana. The study investigated the role of financing mechanism such as subsidy in making SHS more affordable. In this particular work a load require-ments of all electrical appliances from a household leaving in Dawenya a suburb of Tema in Greater Accra Region, with the help of solar radiation database on PVGIS was used to determine the payback period. A sensitivity analysis was fur-ther carried out and the result revealed that a modest subsidy of 10% would be result in a payback period of about 12 years.