The Executive Director of Instutute for Energy Security Nana Amoasi said Ghanaians should brace up for more power outages moving forward as government struggles to keep the power stable due to indebtedness.
“This will not be the last time dumsor will rear its ugly head. Bui Power as we speak is operating below minimum water level so they cannot fire full throttle”
The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), on Wednesday June 23, 2021, announced that parts of Accra will experience scheduled power outages for 22-days starting from Monday, June 28, 2021.
The outages, according to the power distributor, would allow the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) to complete the last phase of repair works on some bulk supply points and transmission cables in Accra, adding that the exercise will cause an interruption in power supply to some 71 communities which have been categorised into 6 groups within Accra.
The statement also said each community will be without power from 6:00 pm to 12:00am once a week, within the 22-day period lasting between June 28 and July 19, 2021.
The Managing Director of ECG, Kwame Agyeman-Budu, appealed to the public to bear with the company as they work to ensure an improved service to Ghanaians.
However, Nana Amoasi VII believes this is not the last time Ghanaians will be hearing these announcements. Explaining that there are still more distribution challenges that the insititutions in charge of the country’s power sector, have not been able to deal with successfully. Those challenges he said have to do with rise in energy debt which is causing “a lot of cash flow constraints for these utility providers to maintain their system”. Again, one of the challenges he identified is issues that has to do with what he called inefficiencies that need money to resolve.
“There are distribution challenges as well as there are inefficiency problems and in all these inefficiencies, you will need money to deal with these issues. We have our energy sector debt go up, causing a lot of cash flow constraints for these utilities to maintain their system, today, I can tell you government still owes the IPPs close to 1 million dollars, so every moment you will see debt rising in the sector and that create a lot of problems for maintenance and system challenges”
The effects of the challenges he enumerated according to him is unreliable power supply.
