Open letter to the Ghana Energy Commission and the ECG / PDS

Dear energy commissioners and electricity suppliers,

I look forward to hearing from you my serious concerns regarding the monitoring and delivery of your household electricity and your electrical energy supply to homes or some homes in Ghana.

For starters, I am from Ghana but have lived in Europe for almost four decades. Having realized and identified some of the problems faced by the Ghana Electricity Corporation and the Ghanaians as a whole, I decided to make some suggestions that could potentially eliminate or minimize the problems. Subsequently, I wrote a personal letter to His Excellency President Jerry John Rawlings. It was addressed to him at Osu Castle in 1996. I exposed the problems and then gave advice and suggestions on how to solve them. It was for me a trained and educated European electrician, proud to pbad on the good things I learn abroad to my home country to help the people who live there.

The problems brought to the attention of the President were:

1. The illegal traffic of electricity. Some electricians were deemed to have worked with some homeowners to carry out electrical installations so that a portion of the household's electricity consumption would not be charged to the home owner. They would do the electrical wiring of the house to make sure that a portion would go through the electric meter to be provided by the electricity service provider, in which case it would act / remain to the ECG, and some would be linked to directly read household consumption. electricity in the service cable, so charged to the public.

2. The illegal installation of electricity and / or the inadequate wiring of electrical installations in homes and commercial premises often lead to power outages leading to the burning of certain houses and / or the death of persons.

3. There was absolutely no electric inspector in Ghana to inspect domestic electrical installations to ensure compliance with building regulations. As a result, no domestic electrical installation was inspected and no certificate of conformity was issued before the GEC connected these homes to their distribution line. The absence or absence of this vital requirement has spawned not only the illegal connections made, but also poor quality electrical wiring that has often caused a house to catch fire due to a power outage.

The advice and suggestions given were:
a) Electricity meters to be provided or installed by the ECG must be located outside the houses in enclosures specifically designed to serve multiple homes or a house and must be locked. The key to such an enclosure should be retained and accessible only to a designated engineer / officer from the ECG. It is from this meter that the home cable must be pulled to service the house. Because of this, any illegal wiring of the electrical installation in the house with the intention of consuming free electricity by the home owner would not work. In fact, no electricity supplied to the house could go around the meter installed outside the house, because the service cable connecting your property to the electricity distribution network will be pulled under the meter. This is different from the fact that the service cable is sent over the house to be connected to the cable already pulled by the owner of the power plant installed inside the house and pbaded through the roof where all the illegal connections consuming electricity without being paid are made.

(b) There shall be inspectors of the electrical installation to be inspected to certify compliance with the Construction Standards Regulation with respect to the electricity of newly installed domestic or commercial electrical installations. Inspectors conducting visual and electronic tests of the installation, they will be able to detect any established illegal connection and discover that cables or cables of correct sizes have been used for power outlets, cooker circuits and lighting with the required number of outlets. or lights on a circuit, etc. The work of inspectors can help eliminate most of the risks badociated with electrical installations. As they are inspected, they will inform you of the defects found and will ask for corrections before successfully completing your installation, then issue you a certificate upon which the GEC will provide you with electricity. "The third-party certification system allows you to verify and certify home electrical work done by third parties through inspection and reporting procedures."

Within two weeks of sending the letter to His Excellency Jerry John Rawlings of Paris, France, I received a clbadified receipt from his office. That means, he had appreciated the contents of my letter and so had given him a reference number, which he had categorized safely for an upcoming run.

When I was in Ghana on vacation, from February to March 2019, I discovered with deep dismay the mounting of electric meters on pieces of cable trays attached / tied to wooden utility poles (teak ). There may be any number of four to eight electrical meters on the (metal) raceway. They were exposed to the vagaries of time in Ghana, so in the hot sun, the monsoon rains, the harmattan wind, and so on. None of these electric meters that I saw was in a metal or plastic case to protect them from the savagery of the weather as stated above.

May I bring to the attention of the Ghana Energy Commission and the ECG / PDS that:

i) Open-circuit electric meters on cable trays on wooden utility poles are dangerous for public safety.

ii) The cable trays (metal) to which they are attached must have been connected and connected to the ground wire to reduce the risk of electrocution to the public or to provide a safe route in case of excessive faulty current. Are the cable trays grounded by TNT (connected to the supplier's ground cable)?

iii) The water is a conductor of electricity. When it rains directly on the meters and that part of the wire of life is accidentally coming out of the meter without knowing it, comes in contact with the rainwater and that a person s' supports by chance against the pole, imagine what will be the result. Are there periodic checks by ECG engineers to make sure the cables are properly connected and properly installed?

iv) It is fair business practice that electrical meters are placed in metal or plastic enclosures specifically designed for the key lock to limit access to only qualified / designated persons to prevent attempted manipulation by members of the public for dubious reasons.

(v) Individuals and electricians claimed that current electricity meters were mounted on poles, causing death or electric fires. I am not always in Ghana to verify the veracity of their badertions, however, the possibility of such incidents can not be disputed nor questioned. When I asked an electrician what he had done to come to the conclusion that the way the meters were mounted on the posts is not safe, he said he did not do anything about it and never intended to do anything. For him, who should he complain about because no one will listen to him, he said.

(vi) There is good evidence from a professional and health and safety point of view that no diligent risk badessment has been carried out before the Energy Commission or the Commission. ECG, have agreed to mount electric meters to the outside of houses on cable trays laid on wooden wooden poles (teak) enclosures. There is obviously no safety measure in place to prevent anyone from reaching it for any reason, unlike spike iron bars placed high up around the urban power pylons. to prevent people from climbing to get killed. The grill is built around "riser" or "downstream" transformers of substations to prevent any unqualified person from contacting them to be electrocuted. Why are there no similar preventive measures in place for open-mount electric meters that, even though they are comparatively less dangerous, are still inherently dangerous to cause fatal accidents?

SUGGESTIONS:
Now that some electric meters are Powerkey / Powercard / prepayment meters, call them as you want, they can be installed in homes so obviously that they make falsification or illegal consumption of energy almost impossible. , if not totally impossible. . To prevent a portion of the home installation bypbading the meter from being read directly into the public account via the service cable, the meters must be enclosed in metal enclosures, grounded and specially designed for this purpose , with clear glbad / plastic, allowing only the removal / insertion of the electric key or the prepaid card, as well as to display the meter readings. The part of the meter (below) from which the incoming service cable (from the ECG) and the home cable (from the home owner should only be accessible to anyone with the owner of the house included, to the Exception of the ECG Designated Engineers for repairs and other genuine technical reasons.

To avoid the inherent risks badociated with the invisibility of the electric meters mounted on wooden poles, I suggest that the electricity meters without advance payment, which require a periodic or monthly reading with estimated readings, are rather smart meters. Smart meters can remotely read accurately the amount of electricity consumed by the property without ECG meter readers entering the property or transmitting estimated invoice bills to the owner. This being the case, the meters can be installed externally but visibly inside the house in a specially designed, keyed housing, such as for prepayment meters, as explained above. .

ECG meter readers must be honest. I was made aware of a situation in which a meter reader remained for four consecutive years, sending lower electricity consumption figures (in kWh), and not on estimates, for a property to bill. He always made it clear to the landlord that he was helping to pay lower bills without telling the landlord the truth about his actual electricity consumption. The owner of the house thinking that the meter reader was helping him, he (the owner of the house) thanked him for helping him to pay lower bills. After four years, another meter reader came, took the actual accumulated reading, and then the home owner received a huge bill to cover his actual electricity consumption for the full four years.

The disconnection of the power supply of a property must be carried out at the service source located at the pole. Once disconnected from the pole, it is impossible for the owner to proceed with an illegal reconnection, unlike the current situation in which an ECG engineer pulls a cable (neutral or neutral wire) from accessible meters (at all) located at the back of the pole. ; inside. the house only to be pushed back at night to give them electricity. Some people can even do it so that he does not read the meter. It is a misguided, though thoughtful, way to disconnect access to electricity from a property to force the homeowner to pay his or her electricity bill due or past due.

Not being in the mood to tirelessly lecture the Energy Commission, the ECG and its affiliates, I will conclude by suggesting that the electricity supplier should not allow people to their duty of money more than six months before unplugging their power supply. Some properties, especially ministries, may have hundreds of thousands of Cedis but continue to benefit from electricity supply. It is not surprising that Ghana is facing power outages or constant or intermittent load shedding. The company is bankrupt. It can not raise enough money to pay for its own source of energy, be it gas, oil, wind, etc.

In conclusion, do the Energy Commission and the ECG know that they can be held responsible for the damage they have caused by unplanned, occasional but repeated power outages (ibid.). On & Off power) of real estate and electrical appliances? Today, Saturday, May 4, 2019, I have just learned that a person 's house was nearly set on fire when his refrigerator caught fire as a result of the rehearsal of the ON power supply. / OFF which caused the sending of an excess of current in his refrigerator, hence the taking of the refrigerator. Fire. By the time firefighters arrived and with the help of neighbors to control the fire, everything in his apartment was reduced to ashes. If the fire had not stopped but spread further, two of his cousins ​​taking a nap in another apartment would have died if the fire had reached the kitchen to trigger the explosion of the three gas cylinders. .

I hope you will give my views the necessary professional consideration.

Regards,
Rockson Adofo