Chairman of Parliament’s energy committee Kwabena Donkor has blamed the current erratic power supply on government’s’ failure to plan adequately for the future.
He said, “as a country we are too interested in today at the expense of tomorrow.”
Speaking to Joy News’ Elton Brobbey, Dr. Donkor stressed that “we are too short-termish in our approach across government. We should move from short term orientation to long term, if we don’t we will keep on firefighting. What we are doing currently is pure firefighting.”
The recurrent power outages which have hit the country over the past months are said to worsen as almost 300 megawatts of power have been due to shortage of supply of gas to power thermal plants, officials of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) have stated.
According to the ECG, it is unable to publish a timetable for the current power outages due to fluctuations in supply from the power producers.
Public Relations Officer of the company William Boateng said: “Now it’s on ‘as-and-when basis’. As-and-when means that any time we have a challenge, that is when one of the plants has to shut down for maintenance, then we have to shed some load.”
However, Dr. Donkor said even though the supply of gas from Nigeria has been inconsistent, it should not be used as an excuse adding that, the situation is not a new phenomenon.
He said the situation must be blamed on the nation’s refusal to invest in enough generation over the years, and “we have all known that gas supply from Nigeria is unreliable, having known that what else have we done?”
“We all know that our own indigenous gas will be inadequate to meet our current and future fuel needs in the power sector, with this knowledge and expertise, what is it that we have done over the years,” he questioned.
He advised that Akosombo and Kpong hydro electric dams, which are the country’s cheapest source of generation, should be dedicated to strategic industries to boost the supply of gas in the country.
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