The Minister of Energy and Green Transition, John Jinapor, has appealed to Ghanaians to exercise restraint following Thursday morning’s power outage that affected parts of Accra and other parts of the country.
The Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) attributed the outage to a fault on the Akosombo-Volta transmission line.
Speaking at the commissioning of a new office complex for the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), Dr Jinapor explained that the latest disruption was linked to a temporary arrangement put in place after an earlier incident severely affected the Akosombo transmission infrastructure.
He said government had initially been faced with two options: shut down the Akosombo plant for about six months to completely rebuild the control centre or introduce a temporary system that would allow the plant to continue supplying electricity while permanent works were undertaken.
According to him, government opted for the temporary arrangement to avoid keeping the Akosombo plant offline for an extended period.
“As ministers, we had a decision to make and I decided that we should go by the temporal measure whilst we put in place a permanent solution,” he said.
Dr Jinapor said engineers had since been working to maintain the temporary system, which had largely supported electricity supply over the past few months.
He, however, explained that the temporary arrangement remains vulnerable to frequency disturbances, which can trigger the automatic shutdown of the Akosombo facility to protect the wider power system.
“Because the temporal measure occasionally, when there’s some frequency disturbance, it takes off Akosombo immediately to protect the system,” he said.
Permanent solution expected next month
The Minister said work on a permanent control centre and related infrastructure was progressing and was expected to be completed next month.
He appealed to consumers to bear with the temporary difficulties until the permanent solution is implemented.
“I would appeal to Ghanaians to bear with us. It hardly happens, but once in a while when you have a major situation, sometimes even brand-new cars you get some challenges here and there,” he said.
Dr Jinapor acknowledged the disruption caused by the latest outage, saying some parts of Accra and other areas experienced power interruptions lasting between about one hour and one and a half hours.
He, however, argued that the temporary arrangement had prevented a potentially longer disruption.
“I can’t compare that to having six months of Akosombo perpetually down,” he said.
The Minister also assured consumers that power had largely been restored across the country.
“I’m only happy to note that despite the challenge we’ve had this morning, GRIDCo has largely restored power to almost all parts of the country,” he said.
He said areas that remained without electricity would be reconnected as soon as possible.
Dr Jinapor expressed confidence that once the permanent works are completed next month, Ghana’s power supply system will become more resilient.
“I’m sure that by next month we’ll swing back to the original plan and we’ll have a much more resilient power supply situation,” he said.
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