High Rise Buildings And Their Energy Consumption

A visit to the Airport Residential area, Roman Ridge and other plush residential areas in the capital city, reveals a very interesting sight of a nation that is witnessing a lot of high rise residential buildings and offices. We should all be excited that despite the fact that the economy is doing well as we all expect, a lot of businessmen are seeing the need to invest in infrastructural development. However, what is scary is that as a nation, how well we are prepared for such massive developments, as far as the provision of essential services, such as electricity, water etc are concerned. Since the early 80�s, we have experienced erratic power supply, what has now come to be known as �Dumsor Dumsor�, has now become a perennial problem, all the successive Governments have all tried to put an end to it, but all to no avail as demand for power exceeds our generation capacity. In the early days, the excuse was that the water levels in the Akosombo Dam has gone down and so power needed to be rationed, that excuse is no longer turnable now, because we have so many sources generating power. In all these years, what our Governments have done is to extend electricity, without the necessary investments to generate enough for the growing demands for power. Now these high rise residential buildings are going to compete with industries with the little that we have which is not even enough. It is obvious that they will be getting their own transformers, because the electrical appliances that will be used for the buildings will be so much. Take for example the Villagio next to ex-President Kufuor�s residence, which has about fifteen or twenty floors, with two or three apartments, each apartment will have an air-condition, that is even if its central air-condition, water heaters or Jacuzzis for bathing, electric stoves or cookers, fridges, and other high electricity consuming appliances. Villagio is used here to illustrate the point, not that we are targeting it. Looking at what is springing up at plush residential area, if nothing drastic is done to increase power generation, the problem of Dumsor Dumsor, will never go away. The Government can keep giving deadlines as to when we are going to get out of the crisis; they will only be postponing the inevitable. Ten years or twenty years, we will still be where we are today, because development as they say is never in abeyance.