For decades, Ghana's economy has been fuelled by abundant inexpensive hydropower. As a developing economy, Ghana's electricity demand has long been relatively low, though rising in recent times due to increasing economic growth, urbanization and industrial activities. However, the rapid demand growth, as well as periodic hydrological shocks, leaves the country increasingly reliant on expensive oil and gas-based generation power plants, with a resultant drain on the national economy. The main electricity generation company, the Volta River Authority, is not able to generate enough electricity for all the demand sectors. The electricity supplydemand margins ̶ the difference between peak demand and available supply ̶ of the country fall short of the recommended engineering practice and thus presents a high supply security risk. The country has been experiencing an increase in the frequency of power cuts over the last ten years. It is clear that Ghana will have to expand and 2 diversify its generation capacity in order to improve supply security. This paper provides a review of the assessed potential renewable energy resources, their current exploitation status, and their potential contribution to the electricity supply of the country. The paper also presents the barriers to their utilization and the existing policy and regulatory instruments to overcome those barriers, plus the current and expected future impacts of these instruments. The results show that Ghana has several RES, such as wind, solar PV, mini hydro and modern biomass that can be exploited for electricity production. While their exploitation for electricity generation is currently very low, providing just 0.13% of the country's generation, the review shows a great potential for RES generation to increase substantially over the next decade, looking at the government commitment and legal frameworks that are being put in place.

Electricity demand response refers to consumer actions that change the utility load profile in a way that reduces costs or improves grid security. The focus of demand response has mainly been on the commercial and big industrial sectors because of the large demand reduction that they can offer to the utility grid operators. Utilities are showing increasing interest in residential demand response (RDR). RDR can be treated as an energy resource which can be assessed and commercially developed, however, there are still some issues that remain to be addressed for RDR to be successful. These include price unresponsiveness of some residential consumers, equity issues and high cost of the metering infrastructure. The aim of this paper is to investigate and present some of the challenges in achieving effective voluntary demand reduction based on a review of residential demand response literature as well as the general residential energy use behaviour literature. The authors propose the use of a hybrid engineering approach using social psychology and economic 2 behaviour models to overcome these challenges and realize the benefits of supply security and cost management.

As a response to mitigate various negative environmental effects of the construction industry, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in green building technologies (GBTs) adoption and development. Consequently, many studies have been conducted on the forces driving the GBTs adoption in different countries. However, there have been few studies identifying the driving forces (DFs) for GBTs adoption in developing countries such as Ghana. This study aims to identify the major DFs for GBTs adoption within the developing country of Ghana. To achieve the objective, 21 DFs were identified from a comprehensive

Many Cookstove programs have been implemented in many countries around the world. The objectives of these programs have been to reduce fuel use and hence reduce deforestation, and improve the health conditions of users by reducing environmental emissions. Other objectives include improving the social life of people in developing countries and reducing global climate change. The success of improved Cookstove programs has been reported as mixed. While some of the programs have achieved their target objectives, many of them have failed. This paper reviews the literature of improved Cookstove programs around the world. It starts with a review of some selected Cookstove technologies, classified by the types of fuel they burn and whether they are fixed or portable. This is followed by a review of different Cookstove programs, with the objective of finding the factors that determine their success, the form they should take, and the role played by the stakeholders. It is found that the success of the programs depends on the factors such as: compatibility of technical parameters of stoves with social expectations, consistency with local needs and culture, attitude of the users who are often afraid adopting new technology, and the stove cost. Also programs that use a "bottom-up" strategy, where users and local artisans play participatory roles in establishing a self-sustaining industry ensure success of the program.

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