The Minister of Energy, Dr Joe Oteng-Adjei, has ordered the three electricity providers to set up a technical committee to investigate the circumstances that have led to a string of nation-wide blackouts in recent times.
The providers — the Volta River Authority (VRA), the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) — are to submit their report to the ministry within 24 hours.
They are also required to outline strategies to forestall future nation-wide blackouts.
The country has experienced three major blackouts since January this year.
Dr Oteng-Adjei told graphic.com.gh in an interview that Wednesday’s blackout was certainly worrying and, therefore, necessitated an independent enquiry to ascertain the challenge. He said, much as the government acknowledged the constraints in the power sector, total blackouts could be prevented if systems were managed effectively.
“The utility companies must be up and doing because Ghanaians are beginning to lose their patience on such incidents which are preventable,” he said, adding, “Incidents of nation-wide blackouts have security and economic implications and should, therefore, not be taken for granted.”
While using the platform to apologise to the public for the inconvenience the inaction of the three providers might have caused them, the minister signalled that people would have to suffer the consequences if it was found that the recurrence was as a result of human error.
While the VRA attributed the latest occurrence to system overload as a result of overstretched demand during peak periods, officials of GRIDCo took exception to that.
According to the Public Relations Manager of GRIDCo, Mr Albert Quainoo, preliminary investigations revealed that the recurrence was as a result of inadequate generation reserve margin to take care of emergencies in the event of collapse.
According to him, the power producer ought to make available an acceptable daily reserve of 160 megawatts, which is about 10 per cent of system demand.
He also blamed the situation on Cote d’Ivoire losing one of its generators, consequently prompting the automatic load frequency device mechanism on the transmission lines to transfer power into its systems, compelling the system trip off.
“At the time of the collapse yesterday, there were some 1,615.7 megawatts available, with a six megawatts reserve, thereby prompting the automatic supply at the time Cote d’Ivoire lost its generator,” Mr Quainoo said.
He said while last Wednesday’s incident resulted from an explosion of a circuit breaker, adequate reserves in the system would have provided some compensation by holding parts of the country on.
The nation-wide outages in recent times have seen disenchanted members of the public taking to social media platforms to vent their frustrations on all three providers.
The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) earlier this month received a report from the providers on the erratic power supply after an emergency meeting to deliberate on the power supply situation.
Similar occurrences were recorded on January 28 and February 26 which officials blamed on system failure following a broken cable said to have fallen on a power generator at the Akosombo Switchyard.
They also blamed the erratic supply of gas from the West Africa, Gas Company (WAPCo) for the inconsistency in supply.
The PURC had been worried over providers’ inability to make available necessary information to consumers on their operations and charged them to ensure that consumers became a focal point in their operations.
The VRA, however, last week announced publicly an end to the month-long load-shedding exercise which was prompted by the shortfall in gas supply.
The return to normalcy was, however, shortlived, as consumers and the public had, over the past days been subjected to sleeping in the dark.**
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