Mr. Kwame Agyeman-Budu, Managing Director (MD) of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), has shared a detailed breakdown of the power distribution process to provide more understanding to Ghanaians that ‘Dumsor’ is not always the fault of the ECG.
During an interview with Rev. Erskine on the Y-Leaderboard Series which airs on Y107.9FM’s Myd-Morning Radio Show, he noted that the ECG has policies for every worker to follow, hence there is no way anyone at the ECG would randomly cut power distribution for no reason. He detailed that the power distribution chain starts from the generators, that is, the Volta River Authority (VRA), which is also an independent power producer, then there is GRIDco, responsible for transmitting and finally the ECG for distributing.
“The generators produce the power and then it goes through the GRIDco transmission lines at high voltage, and steps down to our sub-stations for us to serve our customers so we are at the tail end. We only distribute so anytime there is a power outage, it may be two things:
There are times then GRIDco will call for load shedding because there may be system challenges. There’s a frequency on our electrical system that if we fall below and do not de-load, the whole country’s power will collapse so that is why sometimes, GRIDco has to turn off the power even without us knowing he expunged.
He added that other times, it may be a local fault whereby there is a blown fuse or something has fallen on the power lines. Mr. Agyeman-Badu made clear that whatever the ECG gives to consumers is what they get from GRIDco hence if they do not receive the power transmission from them, there is nothing that they can do.
According to him, there are some areas that whenever there’s power outage, the personnel can see in the control room because some of the sub-stations are linked to the scada system, and then they work on it however, for other areas that are not linked, they may not know when there is an issue.
On that note, he pleaded with Ghanaians to call the ECG whenever there is a problem with electricity flow in any vicinity so that they can attend to it as soon as possible instead of sitting back and throwing tantrums at the ECG.
By: Maureen Dedei Quaye
