ACEP urges govt to invest in transformers to reduce ‘dumsor’

Executive Director of Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), Benjamin Boakye has asked government to invest in the capacity of the transformers in Ghana to ensure regular distribution of power.

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According to him the reason why some part of Accra has load shedding is because the demand of electricity is outstripping the capacity of the transformers. “As we speak, there are areas in Accra you can hardly get 180 or 190 voltage in your home. It tells you that the transformers in those areas need to be changed. All these things need money. So the localised load shedding (dumsor) will be increasing if we are not able to invest in the distribution sector of the value chain,” he said.

He said this in an energy dialogue on Thursday, themed ‘Ensuring the financial sustainability of Ghana’s energy sector during covid-19 and beyond’.

In his submission, Benjamin Boakye also noted that one of the challenges in the energy sector is the inability of power producing companies to recoup the monies they invested in producing power.

Across the value chain, every agency is making a net loss year after year. ECG alone in 20218 made a loss of over three billion cedis. So what that means is that if ECG buys power and sells the power, they are not able to recover their operation cost and also the cost of purchasing the power from the generators and that affects everybody in the value chain,” he said.

He bemoaned that “if we are not able to deal with that, we may have power plants sitting idle and they cannot generate power for you.”

According to him, fixing this problem can relieve the budget from unwarranted payment because the energy sector problems are not confronted the way they should. He urged government to fix the power sector problems and save the public money.