Ranking Member of the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament, John Jinapor, has charged the Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Samuel Dubik Mahama, to be transparent about the challenges in the power sector.
According to him, the current power outages, also known as “dumsor,” should not be blamed on transformers or maintenance challenges.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) legislator, speaking on JoyFM’s Top Story on March 12, explained that there appears to be a generation problem that has translated into distribution challenges, thus causing the power crisis.
In this regard, he appealed to Mr Mahama to come forward about the challenges so that stakeholders in the energy sector can have a round-table discussion and find a way forward.
“Transformers do not get overloaded overnight. ECG by conversion undertakes routine maintenance in the afternoon, they don’t undertake in the night from 7-11pm. Routine maintenance means that you have planned. You cannot engage in routine maintenance in the day and at the same time in the night.
“In this era of information communication, do not think that you can swindle people. The capacity available is 3,012 Megawatts, and the peak demand is 3,663 Megawatts. Export CIA, that is Cote d’Ivoire, has been reduced to 27 Megawatts, Sonabel in Burkina Faso is at 150 Megawatts, and CED that is Togo is at 54 Megawatts. Load management by ECG is at 600 Megawatts. So from a generation point of view, today, there is a deficit of 600 Megawatts. Some plants are down for maintenance and lack fuel. They don’t have money to buy adequate fuel,” he said.
He continued, “Then our gas production is declining. It has declined by 32% since 2017, so even the throughput in terms of the amount of gas is going down. Look, that is a serious matter, and I am begging Mr Dubik, please don’t ignore that. When you have a challenge, admit that there is a problem. Let’s all find solutions.”
“But when you come and tell us that your transformers are overloaded, please, people are listening, people understand the sector. All transformers in ECG all of a sudden are overloaded, and your routine maintenance is done in the night? Please give us some modicum and some credit of intelligence. When churning out this kind of false information to us, it is not fair at all,” he added.
His comments follow the ECG MD’s insistence that the recent “dumsor” was because, sometimes during maintenance works, there are unforeseen challenges, and it is often very late to communicate these issues to the public.
On the same show, on Tuesday, the Executive Director of the Institute of Energy Security (IES), Nana Amoasi VII, backed Mr Jinapor’s claims that there was a power deficit in generation.
Nana Amoasi VII argued that Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) should address the concerns about power deficit instead of ECG.’
“These are questions that must be answered by GRIDCo and not ECG. We don’t know who is pushing ECG to answer these questions. It is the load given to you by the transmitter GRIDCo that you manage. If you think that you have a deficit that cannot meet your peak demand, you shed load and you give your people a timetable, but to explain why we have a deficit in load, it is for GRIDCo, the system operator, that must answer this question because whether to dispatch a plant or not is decided by GRIDCo.”
“So GRIDCo is the one that tells why this plant is not working, why plant B is working. They have the answers, not ECG. We don’t know why ECG wants to shoulder all these concerns. They must concern themselves with load management. GRIDCo must tell Ghanaians why we are not getting the load that is required,” he said.
