Ghana: Bear With Gov’t In This Trying Times-Energy Minister Appeals To Ghanaians Over Power Outages

Ghana’s Minister for Energy, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, is urging Ghanaians to bear with the government as it takes steps to fix the challenges in the country’s power transmission and distribution network.

The West African nation has been experiencing pockets of power cuts with authorities blaming the situation on technical challenges in the transmission and distribution network.

The country’s power transmitter, GRIDCo has offered explanations to the development and assured customers of efforts being made to address the situation.

However, a section of the population seem not to get the drift as they continually claimed the country has returned to the era of power crisis popularly termed ‘dumsor’ in the local parlance.

Some have also argued that the current development has to do with the rising debts in the energy sector.

Speaking at a press briefing in Accra, capital of Ghana, on Thursday, the Energy Minister stated that the recent power outages had nothing to do with generation but rather technical challenges in the transmission network.

Relying on the detailed explanations provided by the Director for System Operations at GRIDCo, Ing. Mark Baah, and CEO of GRIDCo, Ing. Jonathan Amoako-Baah, the Energy Minister said: “The challenges we face sometimes lead to outages here and there. Just like the technical people said there is no generation problem. Yesterday power outage, as has been explained to us, was caused by reduced pressure of the gas that was going to the generator and that could not have been foreseen or planned by anybody.

“And because most of our generators are now relying on gas and gas comes through only a few pipelines to all these generators, the effects of gas shortage affect many generators than if individual plants were being fueled by diesel or crude oil independently.”

Addressing the debt issue, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh also revealed steps the government has taken to address the energy sector debt.

He said apart from the Cash Waterfall Mechanism, which allows ECG to collect revenue from power sales and shared generators, distributors, fuel suppliers and transmitter’s government has also introduced Gas Clearing Fund and Delta Fund to help deal with the debt.

Assurance

The Energy Minister stressed that the government acknowledges the weakness in the transmission and distribution network and is working to strengthen the system to improve on electricity supply across the country.

“We hope Ghanaians will bear with us in these trying times so we can improve the system to get the consistent electricity supply,’’ he said.

Source: www.energynewsafrica.com