Current power cuts to end by weekend – Energy Ministry

The Head of Communications at the Ministry of Energy, Nana Damoah says barring any late development the current power cuts being experienced in some parts of the country will ease.

Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express, Nana Domaoh said the interruptions in power supply will end as it is expected that the supply of gas to the power generation plants will resume.

“To the best of my knowledge all of this will come to an end by the end of this week hopefully,” He told the host of PM Express in a phone conversation.

Announcement of a planned maintenance

The ministry had announced that as parts of planned maintenance on the pipeline supplying gas to some power generators in the country from Nigeria, the ministry had put in place measures to forestall any impact the cut will have on the nation’s power generation capacity.

Despite the said measures put in place by the ministry, there have been complaints of power outages by some Ghanaians since last week.

The Deputy Minister of Energy, Owuraku Aidoo explaining this situation last week said while there were steps taken to reduce the effects of the cut in gas supply, things did not go as planned as some backup supply of gas earmarked by the ministry failed to come through.

“The Kpone Thermal Plant, we've lost one of the generators, which is giving us something in the region of 100 megawatts. We have also lost the TICO Plant (Takoradi International Plant), we've lost parts of it as well, which were not foreseen. We made all these plans and unfortunately this has happened. Cenpower also, we were taking 180, a combination of 360, one turbine is gone off losing 180 so when we combine these unforeseen generators that have gone off..., right now we are losing something in the region of between 100 and 200 megawatts.

The plants that have gone down that I have enumerated amounts to well over 300, almost 400 megawatts, so that is what has caused this problem but like I said, this is going to be for a few more days and we will come back to normalcy. So I'll apologise once again on behalf of the Ministry of Energy that we will come back to normal.

It is not as people have been saying that 'dumsor' is back and we've gone back to the bad old days again, no. This is work that needed to be done to ensure the integrity of the pipeline and gas supply to our generators," he said