Kumasi Residents Complain About Recent Power Outages

Residents of Kumasi in the Ashanti Region, particularly business operators, have expressed outrage over the incessant power outages being experienced there in recent times.

Irate residents who spoke to Joy News complained about how the outages have damaged their electrical appliances, while others said it has affected their productivity.

“During the time of the NDC, they gave us a timetable, but this time there’s absolutely nothing, the lights go off about ten times a day, they should admit that “dumsor” is back,” one trader said.

Another also lamented, “The unstable lights is making me lose so many jobs, sometimes when the lights go off in the morning, it comes back in the afternoon and that is worrying, without light, I can’t do anything.”

The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has since apologized for the outages experienced in some parts the country.

Managing Director, Samuel Mahama, explained that the situation was due to some challenges being experienced by the power transmitter GRIDCo, and assured that his office is working to rectify the problem.

“GRIDCo has had some challenges the past few days and it’s all coming to an end, because I know from 1.00 am, the Trassaco bulk supply point was off, the day before that we picked gas from Nigerian gas and they’ve been having some challenges so it affected the gas load through the power plant in Ghana.”

“We had some massive load pressure so we had to take steps to shed some load immediately, that is what led to two days ago and the outages that happened. We were promised it would’ve been fixed for the pressures to come up but as time went on it wasn’t coming back on.”

“We should’ve actually put out a statement, so I woukd like to take this opportunity to say a big sorry to the good people of Ghana, we should’ve informed you when we got that information so that everybody could adequately prepare,” he explained.

He also said that alternative arrangements have been made to avoid disruption in power distribution

“From the Eastern corridor, we’re relying on gas from Nigeria, on the western corridor we have Ghana Gas coming in, but sometimes the distance and all of that also leads to pressure issues, so we’re actually supposed to have alternative fuels in the tanks of each individual power plant.”

“We have a constant plan in place to make sure that we have enough stock or storage for alternative fuels in case we have any shortage in gas moving forward for this period,” he said.

Mr. Mahama also hinted of the setting up a short code, where customers can report outages for quick assessment and rectification.

“We’re actually in the process of coming up with some WhatsApp lines for you to drop out location pins and details whenever there’s an outage in your area so we can come quickly.”

“We’re trying to get a way to move to you straight based on fault on a regional basis so that the districts can tackle them,” he explained.

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