Mahama inaugurates a 16.8 million-dollar Gridco project

President John Dramani Mahama has inaugurated a 16.8 million-dollar systems control centre constructed by the Ghana Grid Company at Kpone with the assurance to build a resilient power transmission in the coming years.

He said the government was committed to ensuring adequate supply of the commodity that would enhance the rise in industrial activities to achieve the government’s golden age of business goal.

President Mahama explained that, government over the weeks had been engrossed in restoring the energy the country had lost through the interruption in the West African Gas Pipe-line and to add more energy that would brace the country up to become a net exporter of energy in the coming years.

The system Control Centre, which was funded by the World Bank, would replace an outdated centre to modernise and ensure the effective monitoring and supervisory control of the Ghana Power Network and power exchanges between member countries of the West African power pool.

The replacement would also upgrade all the Remote Terminal Units in all the 48 sub-stations in Ghana and beyond.

President Mahama also condemned the high spate of fires in the markets and now in the power sub-stations and gave the assurance that the government would conduct full-scale investigations to ascertain the cause of the outbreaks.

He called for the establishment of efficient customer service centres that would serve Ghanaian energy consumers satisfactorily.

The President appealed to the Volta River Authority, Electricity Company of Ghana, GRIDCo and all the energy generating authorities to step up their activities to achieve the goal of making Ghana a net energy exporter.

Mr Charles Darku, Chief Executive Officer of GRIDCo, said the completion of the project would give a total remote coverage and control of the entire National Interconnected System comprising 66-substations and switchyards as well as about 5,000 circuit kilometers of the transmission lines across the country.

He said the new facility had an online energy tele-metering system to ensure access to energy consumption data at each load centre on a real time all basis and various software and hardware tools for load forecasting.

The CEO said operators had been trained to manage the facility on 24-hour basis to detect faults and to have early warning of certain imminent failures and take preventive action.

Mr Darku said GRIDCo was about completing the construction of a new 150 kilometre 330KV transmission line from Tema to Lome, Togo, which would be continued to Sakete in Benin to link up with an existing 330KV line from there to Ikeja in West Nigeria.

Mr Emmanuel Armah Kofi Buah, Minister for Energy and Petroleum, said all measures Ghana had taken over the last two weeks demonstrated its commitment to ameliorate the energy challenges and to work hard to become a net exporter of the commodity.