The Director of Operations for the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Ing. Tetteh Okyne has stated that the ECG has taken a decision to complete all planned maintenance works by the middle of November this year.

He said the ECG has taken note of the series of outages in some areas within their distribution system but wish to state that it is not load shedding.

Explaining the reasons behind the outages, Mr. Okyne said “like any other machine which needs to undergo regular maintenance, ECG has a schedule for regular maintenance of its transformer.

In this case, ECG makes announcements to inform its customers and the general public about the maintenance prior to the shutdown. Since we have control over the planned maintenance, we are able to inform customers when we intend to commence and end the work.

Also with pre-emptive maintenance works, we have to shut down a sub-station, whether it is a Bulk Supply Point(BSP), a primary sub-station or a secondary sub-station, to quickly rectify a fault so that it does not degenerate into worse situations leading to fire outbreaks or destruction of equipment.

In emergency situations, where a fault is identified which needs immediate shutdown of the system, it is very difficult to inform customers prior to the shutdown. We only communicate an apology after customers are already off”.

Ing. Okyne further explained that planned outage for project works is also another factor for the current power outages.

He said planned outage is where ECG undertakes project works to improve the distribution system or network and added that this can take the form of replacement of obsolete equipment or network, installation of transformers and the extension of power supply.

“This type of planned outage for project works can sometimes extend to weeks before the project is finally completed. Again, the timing of the outage; switching it off in the mornings and on in the evenings, can easily be misinterpreted as a load shedding exercise. With this particular exercise, it is very easy to inform customers of what ECG is doing to improve the distribution network to customers”, he added.

He said the construction of roads, the falling of trees and the hanging of birds and some reptiles on the electric cables are all causes of power outages since they interrupt the flow of power.

Ing.Okyne said accidents and faults are inevitable in the power distribution system and indicated that ECG is maintaining and managing 28 Bulk Supply Points, 101 Primary Sub-stations,21,000 Secondary Sub-stations and almost 70,000km of overhead network system.

“Faults may develop in any of these installations, fortunately, we have SCADA system on our High Voltage Lines, BSPs and Primary Sub-Stations, so our sub-transmission control room monitors and automatically gets informed of outages.

However, faults that occur at our Secondary Sub-Stations and on the Low Voltage Distribution lines are not automatically communicated to us by the system. This is where we encourage our customers to inform us of the outages they experience”, he stated.

He outlined ECG’s plan of action to reduce the outages;

ECG to deploy more third party contractors to assist clear trees interfering with our overhead lines as soon as possible.

Position engineers at strategic locations to promptly attend to emergency calls to shorten the intervention time.

Reschedule non-critical projects to reduce outages currently being experienced.