The Electricity Company of Ghana has been blamed for “managing energy from the power sector with grammar”, making it difficult to address the actual problem contributing to the ongoing load shedding in the country, also known as ‘dumsor’.
Executive Director of the Chamber for Petroleum Consumers (COPEC), Duncan Amoah, has been telling Alfred Ocansey on the KeyPoints Saturday, March 30, 2024, that the ECG has been overburdened with debts and the monies it collects which should have gone to the coffers of the power generators is not going, being the reason Ghana has been plunged back to dumsor.
He says it was time part of the ECG’s work given to other entities, aside from the fact that the power distribution company has failed to disclose the real challenge of lack of capital causing the power disruptions in the country.
Mr. Amoah said the ECG cannot pay the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) but they are telling Ghanaians they have faulty transformers.
“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 disclosed.
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.
