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The executive director of the African Center for Energy Policy, Benjamin Boakye, says the country is losing billions of dollars to existing infrastructure failures in the energy sector.
Interacting with Newsfile host Samson Lardy Anyenini on Saturday, Benjamin Boakye explained that GRIDCo’s failure to invest in capacity banks is costing Ghana $ 25 million per month after reports indicated that only 28 percent of these 944 megawatts of bank capacity nationwide in 2020 were functional.
“We are wasting about $ 2.5 million every month by not repairing that equipment. [capacity banks]. That is not something the government has to come in and provide money for. Those are management issues that can be addressed with whatever resources they get from the system. $ 2.5 million wasted by 38 megawatts of energy that is not consumed but is wasted in the electrical network due to a 10 million dollar piece of equipment that we have to repair, “he said.
His comment comes after reports from some power service providers, such as GRIDCo, ECG, that recent power outages are due to technical challenges on transmission lines and grid substations.
He added that the works GRIDCo is carrying out to improve some faulty transmission lines are responsible for the frequent blackout.
“GRIDCo chose their words carefully when they were engaging the media so that they were not telling the public directly that what they are doing is causing the problem we are currently seeing. What we face is the failure of the existing infrastructure and we should not confuse that with the development that is happening, ”he said.
During a press conference on April 1, Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) revealed that detected failures in some transmission and distribution networks have led to recent power outages.
Mr. Boakye noted that relevant stakeholders have failed to optimize the energy sector by investing to cover their own expenses.
According to him, the technical capacity of the infrastructure, together with financial and administrative constraints, are challenging the energy sector to deliver energy efficiently.
“We have not been able to correctly anticipate and invest the appropriate amount of technical solution that will deliver energy efficiently. The distribution of generation transmission really depends on how much money is raised when energy has been consumed. We have not been able to optimize the final distribution to be able to raise enough money to finance the value chain. If you check the key projects that GRIDCo mentioned, these are donor projects. These are brochures. Without these brochures, how would the system fare two or three years later? We are not investing and the electricity sector cannot generate the adequate resource to be able to finance its operations ”, he explained.
On management issues, it revealed that power theft under the Ghana Electricity Company (ECG) in recent years has appreciated by around 2 percent.
“So people are stealing power and, in most cases, the ECG staff themselves help them make the illegal connection. The ECG cannot pretend not to know that this is happening. There are cases where you have a company that consumes so much electricity and for them to go to pay for the electricity, the ECG staff destroy the meter … and they cannot even read what has been consumed during the period. These are management problems that must be solved, otherwise, you will inject as much money as possible and you will not solve the problem, “he added.
