Clean energies for Ghana—An empirical study on the level of social acceptance of renewable energy development and utilization

Abstract

Despite the enormous renewable energy (RE) resources available in Ghana, the country has not seen much development and investments in the sector. Therefore, the government has committed to increasing the share of RE in the country’s electricity generation mix to some 10% by 2030. However, this cannot be achieved without the Ghanaian people’s support since the RE sector is capital intensive and requires both public and private sector participation. This study was conducted to evaluate RE’s social acceptance among Ghanaian people using the ordered logit regression model. A total of 999 valid questionnaires out of 1020 distributed questionnaires were considered for the study. The five-point Likert scale was employed to rank their willingness to accept (WTA) RE. From the results, it was observed that there is a general sense of acceptance of renewable energy among Ghanaians. However, the level of acceptance varies from one respondent to another. The study observed that a majority of the respondents (i.e., approximately 45.65%) agree to their WTA renewable energy, while 36.04% strongly agree. The results also indicate that while 6.21% and 0.3% disagree and strongly disagree, 11.81% of the respondents were indifferent regarding their willingness to accept renewable energy development and utilization in Ghana. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.