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Paper short abstract

With emerging conflicts between the jurisprudence of the Ghanaian Supreme Court and certain arbitral awards providing the backdrop, this paper discusses challenges associated with the internationalization of Ghanaian energy disputes before international arbitral tribunals.

Paper long abstract

An important feature of Ghana’s gas-to-power value chain, both as a response to the country’s cyclical energy crisis and in anticipation of an abundant supply of gas, has been the rise in the number of power purchase agreements (PPAs) that the Ghanaian government has executed with independent power producers to meet future power generation requirements. The increasing number of such agreements has been attended with overcapacity that has consistently posed as a threat to the Ghanaian economy with excess costs and a glut of installed generation capacity. As a way to confront the situation, successive governments have adopted different policy approaches either to situate Ghana as a net exporter of electricity to the West African power pool or to rationalize the PPAs, renegotiating some and terminating others. Terminating PPAs trigger arbitral clauses and internationalize energy sector disputes. With emerging conflicts between the jurisprudence of the Ghanaian Supreme Court and certain arbitral awards providing the backdrop, this paper discusses challenges associated with the internationalization of Ghanaian energy disputes before international arbitral tribunals.