President Kufuor has outlined what he said were interim measures to cumulatively add at least 500 megawatts of energy to national supplies. In his State of the Nation address to Parliament on Thursday, he said the expected amount, far in excess of national shortfalls, will “put an end to the embarrassing and the expensive load shedding of electricity which society and industry have been subjected to over the past six months.” The measures include supplies from the West Africa Power Pool arrangement from which Ghana is to benefit some 200 megawatts supply from Nigeria and Cote D’Ivoire within the next two weeks; The establishment of a 300 megawatt plant in Tema by the Volta River Authority and another emergency plant to supply 126 megawatts by the same company by August and the production of 120 megawatts from the now idle Osagyefo Power Barge when it is eventually powered in the course of the year. He also said a private sector Ghanaian-Chinese venture was in the offing to produce up to 600 megawatts of power by the end of next year. “Government has also contracted three American companies to produce up to 110 megawatts by the end of April this year. These arrangements should all together produce at least 500 megawatts which is far in excess of the present shortfall to end the outages starting next month.” President Kufuor acknowledged plans by a consortium of mining companies that has offered to build a plant in Tema by June, 2007, to supply an additional 80 megawatts of power. He said Government had also initiated action to build the Bui Dam which is designed to generate 400 megawatts of electricity and that a high powered delegation was already in China to conclude arrangements for a credit facility to construct the dam. “So Mr Speaker, Government has not been remiss in its responsibilities. On the contrary, it has taken steps to give both short and long term solutions to the problem. Within the next five years the energy level will be doubled in capacity to cater for the industrial and economic requirements of the nation for the next 20 years.” President Kufuor said efforts were being made yet to find alternative sources of energy like solar and wind for energy production and appealed for the economical use of electrical appliances to conserve energy. He explained that the problem of inadequate supply crept up imperceptibly on the nation since the construction of the Akosombo Dam. He said after the Dam’s commissioning in 1965, the whole nation was lured into believing that it would be an inexhaustible source of power, however the first signs that this belief was naive appeared towards the mid 1980s when the nation suffered the first load shedding from Akosombo. He said the economy then was in no shape to support any serious solutions to the problem and there was a recurrence after the mid 1990s and it was then that a resort was made to thermal plants like Aboadze. He said fuelled by diesel, the plants have proved extremely costly to run and since 2001, government has sought a more permanent solution.