Minister of Energy tours Ghana Grid Company

Dr Joe Oteng-Adjei, Energy Minister on Monday said a major challenge the Government faced on assumption of office in 2009 was unavailability of power, but had managed to improve power generation and distribution in the country.

“There are many power projects across the country to supplement those in Tema, Mallam and Achimota substations, which when completed will make these challenges a thing of the past,” he added.

Dr Oteng-Adjei made the observation during a tour of the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDco), within the Tema Heavy Industrial Zone and Adjiringanor in East Legon, Accra.

He visited the SMELTER II Substation, the National Interconnected Power Control Rooms all at the Tema Heavy Industrial Zone and the Adjiringanor Substation.

Mr Oteng-Adjei said government was working assiduously to eliminate the constraints of availability of power supply in the country, adding that “These on-going projects, when completed would enable the company to handle the peak periods”.

He said plans were underway to expand the Mallam transformer capacity and add two other substations to take some off the load from the Achimota substation to minimise load shedding.

Dr Oteng-Adjei expressed appreciation on the work done so far and urged GRIDco to facilitate work on the rest, to enable them to achieve their goals.

He noted that some of the equipment were 45 years old and the more they replaced them, the more it revealed the weaker nature of the entire system, hence the need to install new equipment.

The Sector Minister explained that the Adjiringanor substation was to complement the Mallam and Achimota substations.

He announced that the US Government’s Compact II Project was mainly for the power sector and hoped that the power problems would be solved.

Mr Charles Darku, Chief Executive of GRIDco said some thermal plants were either being constructed or planned for implementation at Tema and Kpone with an envisaged installed capacity of almost 1,500 megawatts.

He said the projects sought to terminate the Volta-Smelter lines, such that power could directly be injected at the new substation to make use of the power transfer capacity of the existing seven lines between Volta and the Smelter.

It would provide an adequate and alternative power evacuation route for the three power plants connected directly to the New Tema substation – TT2PP, MRP, TT1P, and Tema CENIT Power Project and the proposed steam turbine plant in future.

The project would enhance reliability for the evacuation of power from the Sunon Asogli Power Project and the Cen Power plant, facilitate power evacuation from the proposed power plant to be built by VALCO in future and provide a more reliable transformer substation for ECG at Tema and reduce the dependence on the New Tema substation, as the only BSP for Tema and its environs.

Mr Darku said the project was being funded by a 25- million dollar credit facility provided by Rand Merchant Bank of South Africa and was hopeful that work would be completed by the end of the year.

He said the availability of adequate land and transmission line right of way was a major constraint and stressed the need to develop an optional power evacuation system that would take care of those constraints and at the same time provide reliable and adequate electrical facilities to evacuate the power to be generated from those plants into the national grid.

“The Ghana Grid Company Limited therefore intends to construct a 161 kilo Volts substation to facilitate the evacuation of power from these plants into the national grid”.

“GRIDCo would provide 161/34.5 kilo Volts transformation facilities to supply power to Electricity Company of Ghana as well,” he added.

Mr Darku said there were plans to export power to four neighbouring countries – La Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin and Nigeria, and expressed the hope that in future they would depend on each other in time of crisis.**