In 1949, when Ghana was still known as the "Gold Coast," the government commissioned a British consultant company, Sir William Halcrow and Partners, to determine how to develop the Volta River in the southeastern part of the country as a potential source of generating hydroelectric power. The Volta River Preparatory Commission's 1956 report was encouraging in regards to the feasibility of a dam, but the cost would exceed 500 million cedis, equal to more than $414 million dollars. It wasn't until 1962 that Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, signed the agreement to create the official Volta River Project, which also set up the Volta River Authority to oversee the operation of the dam once it was built. Financing of the dam was funded by an alliance of investors from the United States, United Kingdom and the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, an institution of the World Bank.
Construction of the dam began in 1961, and took three years to complete. To generate power, Lake Volta was created in the township of Akosombo, which required the surrounding areas to be submerged in water, forcing the evacuation of more than 700 villages and 80,000 people living in the region. Lake Volta is the largest lake in Ghana, with an area of more than 8,000 square miles. Though water started flowing into the lake in 1964, the dam itself was not officially unveiled until the following year.
The Akosombo dam is composed of gravity rock-fill. It is 2,200 feet in length, 1,200 feet wide and rises to a top height of 374 feet. A second, smaller dam was built to contain the main dam's overflow. This dam measures 1,200 feet in length, 500 feet in width at its widest point and rises to a height of 120 feet. There are two spillways adjacent to the dam consisting of six 38-by-45-foot steel gates that divert flood waters away from the dam to prevent possible damage.
The dam is powered by a six-unit power house that has a total capacity of 1,020 megawatts. It has 36-foot diameter generators that are encircled by 2.7 miles of copper wire. The generator rotor is 34 feet in diameter and the shafts are 46 inches in diameter. The penstocks -- the gates that control water flow and carry water to the turbines -- are 24 feet in diameter and 360 feet long. The dam generates enough power to provide service to Ghana as well as supplementing the power requirements of neighboring countries such as Togo, Benin and the Ivory Coast.
