Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, the Energy Minister, has confirmed that the sporadic power outages reportedly affecting sections of the country are not due to a capacity constraint or a fuel scarcity.
According to him, this was attributed to the transmission grid being upgraded to ensure the country’s electricity supply is reliable.
Dr Opoku Prempeh disclosed this during an inspection of the Tema-Achimota Transmission Line Upgrade Project at the Volta Substation in Tema, on Tuesday
The 26-kilometer Tema-Achimota Transmission line is currently under construction and is scheduled to be finished in September of this year.
According to the project engineers, when completed, the project would increase the corridor’s capacity for power transmission from 400 megawatts to 1,900 megawatts.
Engineers are now 65 percent of the way into the project and are stringing pairs of conductors and laying electrical cables on the high voltage towers.
Dr Opoku Prempeh addressed the media after the inspection, refuting assertions that the government was not informing Ghanaians the facts about the country’s power generation condition, stating that the latest sporadic power outages could not be comparable to the outages (dumsor) experienced between 2012 and 2016.
The Minister urged Ghanaians to work cooperatively with engineers from the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) to ensure the project’s implementation.
Mr Jonathan Amoako Baah, Chief Executive Officer of GRIDCo, said that the completion of the device update would eliminate regular power outages caused by transmission line congestion.
He explained that it was necessary to link the new bulk supply points with the established ones, which necessitated the connection of the transmission lines, thus the occasional power outages to allow the engineers to operate safely.
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Mr John Owusu Afriyie, Director, Engineering Projects at GRIDCo, explained that the cables along the Tema-Achimota transmission lines had not been modified since 1965, and as a result, they were unable to bear the loads.
As a consequence of this, he demonstrated, sporadic power flickering occurred whenever the load becomes congested on the transmission lines.
Thus, after the device update, the occasional power outages currently occurring will be eliminated, and there will be adequate capacity to ensure service continuity for customers.
SOURCE: ATLFMONLINE
