Ghana loses over GH¢1.3 Million from the illegal connection of power facilitated by agents of power distributors, research by the Africa Center for Energy Policy has revealed.

The research also discovered the involvement of some political actors who are conniving with residential power consumers to fix illegal meters at home.

Policy Lead, Petroleum and Conventional Energy at ACEP, Kodzo Yaodze at a virtual meeting to present the findings, intimated that the situation is widespread.

“We also discovered that agents of the power distributors which include subcontractors, service providers, staff who distribute meters among others, actively facilitate and even advise consumers on illegal connections and meter tampering for their private gain.”

He indicated that politicians who are involved in this act acquire meters from the Ministry of Energy to facilitate the act for electoral expediency.

“Again, politicians were also discovered in the mix, where they get the shared meters from the ministry of energy who procures these meters to share and connect households to the grid for electoral gains without the active involvement of the power distributor,” he added.

ACEP laments the situation is dire and is hence, calling on authorities to take immediate action.

“The result is that people get distributed, they consume the power but because the power distributors are not informed, the data on the meters are not captured into the grid system for billing purposes so they consume the power and they don’t pay for it.”

“Now the evidence that we’ve seen from this work suggests that the numbers of installed shared meters identified is only a tip of the iceberg, we suspect that there are more in the system which will require a very active monitoring to uncover,” he intimated.