The Electricity Company of Ghana
has said power outages in some parts of the Ashanti region may continue until
December this year.
According to the Managing
Director for the ECG, Kwame Agyemang Budu, the situation is a result of some
construction works on the transmission lines in the region.
“From Kintampo to Tamale and
Tamale to Bolgatanga, those two areas have been completed. They are yet to
complete the last phase which is from Kumasi to Kintampo and by the end of the
year, we should have a full 330KV transmission line from Kumasi all the way to
the North.”
“All our power generators are
all the way in the south and power going to the north goes through Kumasi so by
the time the power gets here (Kumasi) losses are incurred, voltages are reduced
so they want to establish a plant here so that power going to the north will
not be a problem and it will not affect the Ashanti region as a whole,” he
explained at a news conference in Kumasi Thursday.
Meanwhile, the Minister for
Energy, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has assured the nation that there are no
challenges whatsoever with power generation.
The Minister, who is also the
Member of Parliament for Manhyia South and popularly referred to as ‘NAPO’,
gave this assurance at a press briefing held by the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo)
in Accra to address the current power crisis in the country.
The situation, he indicated, was
simply due to a technical difficulty with the transmission.
Dr. Prempeh further clarified that none of the current
challenges are due to the government owing any entity and that Ghana has put in
place mechanisms where every generator, transmitter, and distributor of
electricity is paid something regularly.
He also disclosed that the
government is also introducing a gas clearinghouse where funds will be made
available to the suppliers of fuel for our generators.
At the same press briefing,
GRIDCo indicated that it has no intention of embarking on a nationwide load
shedding program in the months ahead and that it is carrying out key projects
to enhance power supply reliability in Accra and Kumasi.
The projects are:
• Millennium Development
Authority (MIDA) funded Pokuase substation and Kasoa Bulk Supply Point
installation
• French Development Agency
(AFD) funded the Tema-Accra transmission line reinforcement project and the
330kV Kumasi – Kintampo transmission line.
With regard to the situation in
Kumasi and the northern parts of Ghana, GRIDCo explained that this stems from
the inability to dispatch the Bui Hydro Electric Plant (HEP) due to the low
water levels.
The implication is that all the
electricity required in that area has to be supplied from the southern part of
Ghana.
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