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John Jinapor, the ranking member of the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament, has demanded a comprehensive probe into a recent power outage that prompted two separate news releases from the Ghana Grid Company Limited, GRIDCo, and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).
According to the MP for Yapei-Kusawgu, the administration is not being open with Ghanaians about the country’s energy condition.
He claims that the two agencies’ justifications for the broad outage that affected various sections of the nation last Friday do not make sense.
The former deputy minister for power during the previous Mahama administration claimed there are stand-by generators, thus the outage cannot be blamed to a malfunctioning generator in an interview with Evans Mensah on Joy FM’s Top Story on Monday, July 10.
“Well, I’m very surprised because the plant is designed to have a backup generator. So if the generator that supplies power to the plant goes off automatically, a backup generator ought to pick up and deliver power because energy supplies are critical.”
“This calls for a total investigations by the regulator and the Ministry of Energy, because how one generator goes off and the entire plant has to be served up is unacceptable in this industry. Power supply is very, very critical,” he said.
The West African Gas Pipeline (WAPCo) and the Atuabo Gas Processing Plant (GPP) have limited supplies of gas, according to the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo), which operates the National Interconnected Transmission System. This has caused a shortage in thermal power generation, the company said on Friday evening.
In a separate statement on the same Friday, July 7, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) expressed regret to customers who had power outages as a result of the situation.
However, the West African Gas Pipeline firm (WAPCo) refuted the Ghana Grid Company Ltd.’s (GRIDCo) assertion that there was a gas shortage because the firm was unable to provide gas.
In a statement released on Monday, July 10, the Ghana National Gas Company also expressed regret to customers for the trouble it had caused.
The Atuabo Gas Processing Plant was temporarily shut down last Friday as a result of the event, according to the national gas business, which also claimed that the incident was brought on by an issue with their on-site power generation equipment. This produced a shortfall of gas supplies for the power generating companies.
Source: Ghanatodayonline.com
