Why water and electricity tariffs will go up again on September 1 – PURC justifies

The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has explained the rationale behind the recent tariff adjustment to begin on September 1, 2023.

According to the Executive Secretary of the PURC, Dr Ishmael Ackah, the increment is due to the high cost of water treatment caused by illegal mining activities also known as ‘galamsey’.

He explained the various factors that have resulted in the tariff adjustments.

“For water, the major driver, one is electricity. However, because we said the industrial customers would experience no increase, this time it didn’t have any effect.

“The (second) major driver for water is the cost of chemicals. So recently, they were using chemicals for water treatment, now what they have moved on to is what we call Colima, which is about two and half times more expensive than what they were using previously. Because of galamsey and others, they have to treat the water, go through a process over three times what they used to do, so the cost of water has really gone up. If your bill was 100, you are paying 1 Ghana cedis extra,” he explained to myjoyonline.com.

He also explained that the decision to exempt industries from the 4% and 1% percent tariff adjustment for electricity and water is to save jobs.

“Industries pay more than they should pay so that residential customers will at least have some space to breathe. But this is also affecting the cost of operation by industries, so we have heard from the AGI that some companies are actually moving their base from Ghana to Cote d’Ivoire or Nigeria where industrial tariffs are lower.

“The second thing is that some are cutting costs. They are introducing some efficiency measures but normally, this affects human resources. So, if the cost of production is going up, ‘why don’t we lay off at least some five people so that we can pay the electricity bill’ therefore we thought that at least we should do it gradually to bring industry to their cost of service with the hope that this will help reduce their cost of production and help them employ more Ghanaians, so that is the intention,” he said.

SSD/DAG

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