The Public Utility Workers Union of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) Ghana, has urged the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) to formulate strategies aimed at resolving the recent power outages instead of insisting on a timetable from the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) regarding these outages.
This call comes in response to PURC’s issuance of a seven-day ultimatum to the ECG, demanding a comprehensive incident report detailing the power outages occurring from January 1, 2024, to the present.
The directive also requires the ECG to specify the amount of load curtailed during each outage, the energy shortfall, and the extent of customer impact.
In a press release dated March 28 and signed by the General Secretary of the Union, Michael Adumatta Nyantakyi, asserted that the current power crisis stems from inadequate power transmission to the ECG.
It added that the erratic power outages were primarily caused by 630 overloaded transformers.
However, given the country’s inventory of 33,000 transformers, the malfunction of a mere 630 cannot be solely responsible for the widespread power issues.
The statement emphasized the need for the PURC to take proactive measures in investigating the root cause of the power crisis rather than solely focusing on demanding a timetable from the ECG.
“The question that needs to be answered is whether PURC, as a regulator, is requesting data from the system operator on outages of BSPs to avoid the speculation by the good customers of ECG of deliberately denying them of power supply which is critical for socioeconomic development?
“Or the upstream challenges are the issues that need to be addressed? Indeed, the cost of unsold energy from the dumping of a BSP is more expensive than a planned outage by ECG for maintenance works. For example, when the system operator (GRIDCo) dumps one BSP such as the Mallam BSP, virtually the entire western part of Accra goes off, including Weija water works and parts of Kasoa. We are hereby appealing to the system regulator to address these issues at the earliest possible time,” the statement read.
“It will interest key stakeholders including PURC, that in the last one and a half years, under the leadership of this current management, ECG has made significant improvements towards becoming a modern utility company with unparalleled achievements of more than doubling its revenue collections and transforming its operations to become a smart utility company. Today, ECG runs a cashless system for the first time in the history of the company, the paperless system, end-to-end digital meter reading and spot billing,” it added.
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