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The executive director of the African Center for Energy Policy, Benjamin Boakye, said the country is losing billions of dollars due to the failure of existing infrastructure in the energy sector.
Interacting with Newsfile host Samson Lardy Anyenini on Saturday Benjamin Boakye explained that GRIDCo’s failure to invest in capacity banks is costing Ghana $ 2.5 million per month after reports indicated that only 28 % of those 944 megawatt capacity banks across the country in 2020 were functional.
“We waste about $ 2.5 million each month not repairing this equipment [capacity banks]. It is not something the government has to come in and provide money for. These are management issues that can be solved from the resources they get from the system. $ 2.5 million wasted on 38 megawatts of electricity that is not consumed but wasted on the grid because of $ 10 million of equipment that we need to fix, ”he said.
His comment follows reports from some energy service providers such as GRIDCo, ECG that recent power cuts are due to technical challenges on transmission lines and grid substations.
He added that the work undertaken by GRIDCo to modernize some faulty transmission lines is responsible for the frequent power failure.
“GRIDCo chose its words carefully when urging the media not to directly tell the public what they were doing, which is what is causing the problem we are seeing now. What we are facing is the failure of the existing infrastructure and we should not confuse that with the development that is happening, ”he said.
During a press briefing on April 1, the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) revealed that detected outages in some transmission and distribution networks led to recent blackouts.
Mr. Boakye noted that relevant stakeholders have failed to optimize the power sector by investing to cover their own expenses.
According to him, the technical capacity of the infrastructures coupled with financial and managerial constraints challenge the energy sector to supply electricity efficiently.
“We have failed to anticipate correctly and invest the right amount of technical solution that will deliver energy efficiently. The distribution of the transmission of generation really depends on the amount of money raised when the electricity was consumed. We have not been able to optimize the end of the distribution to be able to raise enough money to finance the value chain. If you check the key projects mentioned by GRIDCo, they are donor projects. These are documents. Without these documents, how would the system fare two or three years later? We are not investing and the electricity sector is unable to generate the right resource to be able to finance its operations, ”he explained.
Regarding management issues, he revealed that the theft of electricity under the Ghana Electricity Company (ECG) in recent years has appreciated by around 2 percent.
“So people are stealing power and in most cases they are helped by ECG’s own staff to make the illegal connection. The ECG cannot pretend not to know this is happening. There are cases where you have a business that consumes so much electricity and for them to go pay for the electricity, you ask the ECG staff to destroy the meter … and you can’t even read what has been consumed over the period. These are management issues that need to be resolved otherwise you will inject as much money as possible and you will not solve the problem, ”he added.
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