Lack of gas cause of interim ‘dumsor’ - Load C'ttee

The power sector load management committee has announced Ghana is facing intermittent blackouts as a result of lack of natural gas to power thermal plants.

Parts of the country have been experiencing interruption to electricity supply since the start of the week.

According to the chairman of the Load Management Committee William Amuna, “the intermittent disruptions have occurred due to challenges in generation resulting from continuing absence of natural gas supply due to the extension of the maintenance works on the FPSO and persistent under-delivery of gas from Nigeria.”

The statement continued: “The maintenance works on the FPSO, originally scheduled for completion at the end of March this year has now been rescheduled for completion in the last week of April 2016. At the same time, supply from Nigeria has remained at around 10% of contracted volume of 120 mmscf for more than a month now.

“The development has led to the inability to generate and evacuate power from about 100 MW of installed generation capacity which can only run on natural gas; the situation has been compounded by a technical hitch in the conversion of the Aboadze dual-fired TAPCO plant to run on crude oil arising from the shutdown.”

The committee assured that the “current interruptions are temporary” which engineers from the utility companies continue to “work around the clock to keep disruptions to the barest minimum and restore full supply to customers as soon as gas delivery resumes.”