Power back in 3hrs

Industries and consumers should expect the whole country to have power in the next three hours, CEO of Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo), Mr William Amuna has said.

The entire country was plunged into darkness on Wednesday night as a result of a system failure, the cause of which is yet to be traced.

It affected “virtually every part of the country,” Mr Amuna said.

“We lost most parts of the country due to a surge around 9:40pm,” Mr Amuna told the media on Thursday morning, adding: “… We started the restoration programme till about 1am where we were above 1000MW and there was a swing in the power system again and we lost some generation again.”

“Currently we are in the process of restoring,” he said. “Right now almost 50% [of the country has been restored] and we are building up gradually. We should be done in maximum three hours.”

He said GRIDCo would “have to go through our logs” to trace what caused the surge. “This is the second time it’s happening,” Mr Amuna told Citi Fm’s Bernard Avle on Thursday morning.

The first time was in January 2016.

Speaking to Moro Awudu on Class91.3FM’s Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) Thursday morning as well, Mr Eric Asante, the Accra West Public Relations Officer of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) reiterated Mr Amuna’s assurance to Ghanaians.

“The problem with this power system is when you are coming back on supply, you don’t put all systems on at once. When you do that you bring the system down again. Once it has been off, you gradually load the system before it peaks. So some parts of Tema and some parts of Accra have gotten supply now and I believe we should be there by the end of the day,” he stated.