The Executive Director of the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers (COPEC), Duncan Amoah, has projected more power outages from now to next year if rather than admitting to the root cause of the problem, the sector players choose to address the energy challenges with “grammar”.
Mr. Amoah says the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has refused to address the real challenge responsible for the ongoing power outages locally referred to as ‘dumsor’, making it difficult for it to be tackled holistically.
The COPEC boss is of the view that the power distribution company may be lacking what it needs to keep it serving the populace, adding that the workload appears to be too much for them, suggesting portions of the country it currently serves can be given to other companies.
Speaking on the KeyPoints with Alfred Ocansey Saturday, March 30, 2024, he indicated that “the ECG is probably overburdened and I think that we are also not injecting the necessary capital to help them to overcome the burden. We are not addressing the problem because we may be doing something which is not solving the problem.”
He explained that “until they (ECG) admit to the issue and have a round-table dialogue with everybody, that this is where we are, these are the challenges, how do we confront them?” it would be difficult to arrive at a solution.
Mr. Amoah is confident that if the ECG “own up to the challenges, you’ll find the solution but if you don’t own up and you think that grammar and beautifying the scenarios of the situation to say that there is transformers that gone off and we fixing, we are kidding ourselves.”
“We’ll get back in this problem in July, it could get worse before the end of the year, it could get worse by next year because we are simply not finding the financing gap,” he projected.
“You remember getting to the end of last year this issue cropped up. There were power outages and you remember the IPPs had issued threats that beyond a certain threshold, they were going to shutdown their plants. Finance Ministry would call the IPPs and issue them with assurances of comfort, we’ll come back the following month, IPPs are still asking for their monies, it’s not been paid to them. We are simply managing energy from the power sector with grammar, basically and that’s where we are where we are. Until we deal with the problem structurally, until we admit to the financing gap between what ECG collects and what we produce…This is a country that is almost supplementing power to the tune of US$250 million every single month. If this is sustainable, let them admit,” he added.
We have stable national power supply – ECG assures customers
Various parts of the country have been experiencing interruptions in electricity supply in the past weeks, prompting citizens to express their dissatisfaction with the ECG.
This has triggered calls for a load-shedding timetable, but the Energy Minister, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has ruled out such calls.
He has reassured the public of putting in place measures to fix the power supply disruption across the country.
He says the demand for a load-shedding timetable was equivalent to wishing evil for the country.
“That is the word you used, I have never used that word. I have promised you that I am going to work on it. It is not a work that is a single event, it’s a process and we would continue to work on it for the energy sector to become better.
“Ask those who want it to bring it if there is, I have not seen any timetable when you say bring a timetable. What do you mean? The ECG says that there is no timetable coming, why do you want to bring a timetable? For what purpose? Why would somebody get up and wish evil or bad for the country, when it is not planned, you cannot tell the person,” he told a JoyNews reporter during the launch of the NPP campaign in the Ashanti region.
