Underutilised energy infrastructure costs Ghana US$2.5 million loss per month - ACEP

The Executive Director for the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), Benjamin Boakye, has said Ghana is incurring huge financial losses over the lack of invesment of existing energy infrastructure.

According to him, the Ghana Grid Company Limited has failed to make investments with these existing equipment which are known as capacity banks and this has incurred on the country a loss of about US$2.5 million per month.

Speaking on JoyNews' News File programme, Benjamin Boakye revealed only 28 percent of some 944 megawatts of these capacity banks were operational in 2020.

“We are wasting about US$2.5 million dollars every month for not fixing those equipment [capacity banks]. That is not something that government has to come and provide money for. Those are managerial issues that can be addressed from whatever resources they get from the system. US$2.5 million wasted for 38 megawatts of power that is not consumed but wasted on the gridline because of a US$10 million-dollar equipment that we have to fix,” he stated.

Benjamin Boakye further urged for critical attention to be paid to the indebtedness owed to power transmission and distribution companies like the Ghana Grid Company Limited and the Electricity Company of Ghana.

“Indebtedness to GRIDCo has been worsening over the years and it is important that we pay special attention to it. If the government continues to use the power sector to play politics, then we are going to be in this situation for a long time. We need a whole strategic look at our power sector,” Boakye cautioned.

Meanwhile, GRIDCo says some parts of Accra and Winneba will experience some power outages as a result to technical challenges on transmission lines and network substations.

Chief Executive of the GRIDCo, Jonathan Amoako-Baah told journalists on Thursday, April 1, 2021 that some expansion works ought to be undertaken in order to upgrade some faulty transmission lines.