Executive Secretary of the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers, Duncan Amoah, has cautioned that Ghana is not yet out of the woods in relation to the power supply challenges despite recent assurances from the government that operations at the Akosombo Dam have been fully restored.
His comments come amid recent episodes of erratic electricity supply across parts of the country, which the government attributed to ongoing transformer upgrade works as well as a fire outbreak at a control room belonging to Ghana Grid Company near the Akosombo Dam that forced one of the generating units to be shut down.
During his May Day address, John Dramani Mahama announced that all six generating units at the dam were back online and operating at full capacity, a development expected to stabilise power supply nationwide.
However, speaking on The Big Issue on Channel One TV on Friday, May 2, Amoah said the country’s power sector challenges go beyond the restoration of generation capacity at Akosombo.
“When you leave the politicians to tell you what they did and what they didn’t do, you will be forced to believe that we are out of the woods, but the truth is we are not,” he said.
According to him, Ghana’s recurring power outages are rooted in ageing infrastructure across the electricity transmission and distribution network.
“If you have a system that has been functioning from 1957 till now, and you don’t make a conscious effort to upgrade it, any time there is rain or wind, and you have the pylons touching each other or falling down, you will have communities being affected,” he stated.
“I think it is an infrastructure issue,” Amoah added.
