It is the view of the Executive Director of the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers (COPEC), Duncan Amoah, that part of the work of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) be given to other entities since the power distribution company appears overburdened.
He has expressed the prudence in making other companies take care of the distribution to other parts of the customer-fold the ECG is currently serving looking at the workload on the company.
Just as the Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCo) is serving the northern part of the country, the COPEC boss believes other entities coming in will help resolve the problem of the ECG which has plunged the nation back into power outages also known as ‘dumsor’.
He says the ECG is not owning up with the real challenge hampering their operations and until they admit and get the problem resolved, the dumsor may become worse in the times ahead.
“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,” on the KeyPoints with Alfred Ocansey Saturday, March 30, 2024.
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.
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.
Akufo-Addo has no excuse to plunge Ghana back into ‘dumsor’ – Bawa Mogtari
