ECG’s attribution of power outages to transformer faults inaccurate – PURC

The Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC) says the Electricity Company of Ghana’s (ECG) attribution of power outages during peak hours to transformer faults is inaccurate.

In March, The Commission requested the ECG to furnish data relating to all transformers and power outages in the country.

But PURC after analyzing the data submitted by ECG says it has established that only 3 out of the 647 outage incidents that occurred between 7pm and 11pm from January up until March 18, 2024, were relating to transformers overload.

“Analysis of the data submitted showed that out of 715 transformer details submitted, 31 were loaded less than 70%, 595 were loaded between 70-100% and 89 were loaded above 100%,” portions of the update read.

“The data submitted by ECG was further compared to the total outage data provided by ECG for the period January to March 18, 2024. The Commission established that 647 outage incidents occurred between 7 pm and 11 pm. Of these 647 outage incidents, only 3 were planned outages relating to transformers. The analyses showed that the majority of the outages between 7 pm to 11 pm were as a result of load management operations by GRIDCo and faults unrelated to overloaded transformers,” it added.

“ECG’s attribution of the outages between 7 pm and 11 pm to transformer overload was therefore not factually accurate,” PURC concluded.

PURC also adds that in all, there were 4142 outages to consumers within ECG’s operational areas between January and March 2024.

According to the PURC, out of this number, 165 representing 3.98% of the total outages were ECG-planned outages.

PURC’s further analysis showed that of the 165 ECG planned outages, 40 were supported by public notices, while there were no notices for the remaining 125 outages with a further 38 of the 40 notices not complying with the requisite three-day statutory notice prescribed under Regulation 39 of L.I. 2413.

This indicates that in 163 instances of planned outages, ECG did not comply with the law.

PURC has thus fined ECG board members a total of Five Million, Eight Hundred and Sixty-Eight Thousand Ghana Cedis for failing to provide 3-day statutory notices to customers while they undertook planned outages 163 times this year.

Attached is the full statement