Load-shedding officially suspended, GRIDCO has enough power now - PDS

Peacefmonline.com is reliably informed that the scheduled loadshedding program planned by the Power Distribution Services (PDS) to start Friday, has been suspended for now.

This follows a notice from power generation company GRIDCO, that it has enough power for distribution.

Public Relations Officer (PRO) of PDS, formerly known as Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Mr William Boateng, confirmed this to PeaceFM News during the station's 6pm bulletin.

"Load-shedding Time table"

On Friday morning, PDS released a timetable for its power rationing across almost the entire nation, citing a shortfall in power supply.

Eight regions were to be affected from 6am to 6pm by the first official load shedding table. It followed a meeting between the Volta River Authority (VRA), the Public Utilities and Regulatory Commission (PURC) and PDS.

This was necessitated by the inexplicable and unannounced intermittent power outages being experienced by the public, and repeated calls to have a schedule for everyone to know when they will have power.

"Within 12 Days"

Prior to that, the Ministry of Energy had on Monday, assured Ghanaians that within 12 days power will be restored across the country.

The Deputy Minister for Energy in charge of Power, Mr. William Owireku Aidoo, declared at a press conference on Monday, 1 April, 2019, that recent power outages would end within ten to twelve days.

"Absolute Balderdash"

He described as "absolute balderdash", claims by some people that Ghana is experiencing intermittent power cuts due to a financially-challenged energy sector.

“We have enough fuel, contrary [to claims] that the government doesn’t have money and we are mismanaging the energy sector, that is absolute balderdash....In a nutshell, all that I am trying to say is that we have taken the necessary steps to reduce to the barest minimum the disruption of power to the country,” Mr Aidoo said.

Apology

The Deputy Minister also apologised to the people of Ghana for the outages.

“All I will say now on behalf of the Hon. Minister, the President, of course, is to apologise to the people of Ghana and to assure you that we are doing all we can to bring the supply of electricity to normalcy.”

For now, it is unclear how GRIDCO managed to generate power within this short period for distribution by the PDS for the suspension of the planned load-shedding time-table.