ECG to end localised outages by end of March

The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has assured to end all localized power outages by the end of March 2016.
The Managing Director of the ECG, Mr Robert Dwamena in interview on Joy FM Tuesday morning assured that the outages which are as a result of faults with some distribution lines and equipment would be resolved in the next three months.

Many areas in the county especially in the capital of Accra have experienced a continuous power supply for the past two weeks without much outages as has been experienced in the last four years.
This is as a result of an increase in the generation capacity with the coming on board of new plants such as Karpower barge and the Ameri plant.
Throwing light on what consumers should expect with regards to the power situation in the radio interview, Mr Dwamena said: “We are mindful of ensuring that we have system reliability in all areas of operation… because we went through a load management programme, we were not able to measure the full demand of our customers because you go off for a period and come on. But now that we are having constant supply, now people are using all their appliances and this is showing in the transformer loadings. We have enough transformers in the system getting to over 2000 transformers to make sure that we are able to overcome challenges like transformer over loadings”.
Mr Dwamena disagreed with suggestions that 'dumsor' would be back but said: “we will continue to have some challenges in the system and we believe that within the first quarter we should be able strengthen our networks in such a way that most of these faults in the system, we will be able to withstand it."
On the recent tariff increment, Mr Dwamena said it would be difficult to reduce the tariffs since they did not even get what they requested for.
He said the power sector needs to be robust and should not go back after going through the challenges.