Accra (Greater Accra) 15 April ?99
The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) said in Accra on Wednesday it is constructing three new primary sub-stations at Dansoman, Ridge and Baatsona to address overloading problems. It said the Dansoman station is expected to be ready by the end of April while the Ridge and Baatsona stations would be ready by the end of the year. A statement issued in Accra by the Public Relations Manager, Mr Kwamina Longdon on current unannounced outages explained that some of them are caused by underground cable faults around the Achimota main substation and Accra Central Business areas.
It said these faults were caused by "third parties", including Ghana Telecom, Ghana Water and Sewerage Corporation and road contractors.
Their activities "quietly hit our buried cables which, with time, show up as faults and trip our systems."
The statement said ECG has had wire cuts on its 33 kilovolts overhead transmission lines and 11 kilovolts overhead distribution networks because the conductors are old.
The company has also experienced sudden load-growth in the Accra Central area due to improved quality of supply bringing in its wake undue strains on the networks and overloading the power transformers at the Makola main G substation.
Loss of significant power generation by the Volta River Authority (VRA) also results in the deterioration in frequency of supply and this causes the three main stations at Korle-Bu, Odorkor and Teshie Nungua to trip automatically to prevent the national grid from collapsing.
"ECG has no control over these tripping and the restoration of supply is dictated by VRA's generation improvement."
