Dumsor: Government reaches agreement with WAPCo over US$20m debt - Report

The government of Ghana (GoG) has reportedly reached an agreement with the West African Gas Pipeline Company (WAPCo) to settle a US$20 million debt.

The major gas supplier cut supply this week resulting in a widespread power cut.

The Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) in a statement announced that the disruption of October 26 was as a result of a gas supply gap of 550MW at peak time.

Accra-based Joy News reports that despite the tentative agreement reached between GoG and WAPCo "some outages are expected to happen since the agreement does not guarantee that there will be gas from Takoradi to Tema in the immediate."

Addressing the outage and its cause as contained in the GRIDCo statement, a member of the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament, Edward Bawa, tasked government to quickly deal with the lingering debt.

“Government must find a way or make an arrangement with WAPCo as to how that can be paid. If WAPCO begins to have some comfort that government has kept in touch to do the payment, then, I believe that it will work.

“Government must be working to see how they can give WAPCo some level of comfort to continue transmitting gas from Obuasi to Tema or else we are going to be in trouble. If the gas does not come, what it simply means is that the plants cannot run because they use fuel. And if they cannot run, you’d have that 'dumsor','” he suggested.

Bawa stated that WAPCo has not been paid since January 2023, hence the accumulation of bills and the resort to cutting supply.

“Now the question you would ask is whose liability is it? It is true that if you look at ECG, they do not have a healthy access or guarantee to be able to always go into arrangements with power or gas utilities so GNPC stood in as a guarantee for ECG.

"So ECG has to pay WAPCo but unfortunately because for almost 13 months now the cash waterfall mechanism where all the monies that ECG collects after selling power is put for it to be distributed among the utility mechanism is no longer working, ECG is unable to pay the liability,” he explained.

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