GRIDCo mentioned the outage was caused by a major fault on the Akosombo–Volta line
Recurring power outages will continue unless the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) identifies and fixes the main problems affecting the national grid, Director of the Africa Sustainable Energy Centre, Justice Ohene-Akoto, has cautioned.
He said GRIDCo must provide clear information on what is causing the repeated power failures and the steps being taken to prevent them.
His comments follow a widespread power outage on Thursday, August 20, which affected several parts of the country.
GRIDCo mentioned the outage was caused by a major fault on the Akosombo–Volta transmission line, which led to the automatic shutdown of generating units at Akosombo and some thermal plants.
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However, Ohene-Akoto questioned whether the explanation fully addressed the problems facing the power system.
“We think GRIDCo is not telling us something. We think GRIDCo should be more transparent on exactly why some of these things are happening,” he said on Channel One Newsroom.
He believes frequency problems within the national grid could be contributing to the repeated outages.
The energy expert noted that he raised similar concerns after an earlier nationwide system collapse, although GRIDCo attributed that incident to lightning.
He said recent comments by the Energy Minister linking the latest incident to frequency issues support his concerns.
According to him, GRIDCo should conduct and publish a detailed investigation after every major outage, explaining what went wrong and how it intends to prevent a repeat.
“If they came out to give us a comprehensive root cause analysis and a comprehensive roadmap, we’d have held them accountable with this one,” he said.
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He then questioned whether plans to build a new control centre would solve the problem if weaknesses in the power system are not addressed first.
“If the underlying issue were not resolved, we are going to burn the control centre as well,” he warned.
He therefore called on GRIDCo to make its findings public and provide a clear plan to address the technical problems behind Ghana’s recurring power outages.
DR/SA
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