Crash in the Ivorian system caused country-wide power outage- GRIDCo

Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) has apologized for the loss of electrical power supply which occurred throughout the country on Wednesday, March 21.

It said the cause of the power outage was as a result of loss of a generator in the Ivorian power system which is interconnected to the Ghana system adding that the loss of the generator led to a frequency decay and instability in the Ghana power system leading to the loss of all power generators in the country.

This was contained in a statement signed by Mr Albert Kwesi Quainoo, Head of Public Relations of GRIDCo to Ghana News Agency on Thursday.

The statement said the Ghanaian and Ivorian power system were continuously interconnected to provide for a more robust system and ensure maximum benefit from the voltage support that the interconnecting line provides.

“GRIDCo further wishes to clarify that the fundamental problem with the power supply situation today is that there is not sufficient generation to meet the load on the system”, it said.

It said for reliability purpose, the generation reserve on line to meet unexpected occurrence such as Wednesday’s situation should have been 160 Megawatts (MW).

The statement said at the time of the collapse on Wednesday, the demand on the power system was 1615.7MW with the generation reserve being only 6 MW instead of the acceptable level of 160 MW.

“With the loss of generation in the Ivorian power system and the resultant automatic export of power into their system, the absence of sufficient generation worsened the frequency decay, leading to its collapse”, it said.**