The Energy Minister has urged Ghanaians to remain calm while the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) works to address the intermittent power outage in the country.
Dr Opoku Prempeh refuted the assertion that the energy sector is in a financial crisis thus contributing to the power outage.
Speaking to the media during his visit to GRIDCo, he added that, the current system upgrade is responsible for the intermittent power outage.
“As far as we can see, the projects is an ongoing project and so it is not about finances, it’s just like when you are renovating your house, sometimes it’s more complicated and expensive than even building a new house,” he said..
For some months now, parts of the country have been plunged into a state of darkness often without prior notice since the beginning of 2021.
Some citizens fear that the much dreaded erratic supply of power popularly referred to as ‘dumsor’ has resurfaced.
But the Minister has called for the citizenry to remain calm.
Dr Opoku Prempeh further called on Ghanaians to bear with the situation assuring that the power sector will be stronger after the works.
According to him, the power crisis “is not a generation problem, this is not about fuel, so how could it be ‘dumsor’? Dumsor is planned and the timetable is rolled out and it affected the whole country for four years. Is that what we are seeing? No.
“This our lines that we have just been informed have been there from 1950, some from 1965. The power it was supposed to transmit, Accra has expanded tremendously so they are given us power or lines that can improve the power situation in Accra. What we are implementing is the best for them [Ghanaians],” he added
Meanwhile, the Director of Engineering with GRIDCo also indicated that the system upgrade will resolve the current power crises.
“The line when completed will increase the transfer capacity between volta substation in Tema here and Accra, it will increase it from about 400 megawatts to about 1,900 megawatts.”
But for the meantime, he says “for a period of maybe one or two weeks, there will be an outage. So we will sit down with ECG to make sure that the impact will be as minimum as possible.”
