Power outages not our fault – ECG

The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has attributed the recent power outages in certain parts of the capital to upstream systemic challenges.

The power distribution company is, therefore, appealing to the general public to report outages to the ECG call centre to enable them to expedite action on their concerns.

Some parts of Accra, such as Spintex, Teshie, Dzorwulu, Adenta and Weija, in recent times, have been experiencing intermittent and prolonged power outages.

But speaking on Class91.3FM’s Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Wednesday, 29 January 2020, the Public Relations Manager of ECG, Theresa Osabutey, said the challenges faced by its partners in the electricity value chain, GRIDCo and the Volta River Authority (VRA), over which it has no control, were a major contributing factor to the outages.

“It is due to some system challenges that we had upstream. You know for us, ECG, we get the power and we distribute to our customers but we have other companies that help in the chain of the electricity business; and, so, if they’re having challenges, it will definitely impact us and some of the challenges are things that we do not have much control over”.

Continuing, she mentioned: “When it is an outage that we’re going to carry out from ECG, you’ll bear with me that we carry out announcements to the public; we have various types of work that will demand outages, like we want to do maintenance and for that we know, and, so, we carry out announcements.”

She urged electricity consumers to call and report power outages to the ECG call centre to enable the distributor to work on their concerns, since it could be due to a localised fault.

“We always advise customers that any time you’re having such outages in your area, make us aware”, she said.

ECG owes GRIDCo and VRA several millions of Ghana cedis.