General News of Sunday, 17 March 2019
Source: citinewsroom.com
2019-03-17
Mami Dufie Ofori, Executive Secretary of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC)
The Executive Secretary of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), Mami Dufie Ofori, has said the commission will look into the reasons given by the Power Distribution Services Limited (PDS) for the recent power outages.
PDS has faced increased scrutiny following the near-total grid shutdowns.
The blackouts have been attributed to ongoing construction of the road interchange at Pokuase, which has necessitated the diversion of GRIDCo’s 330kV transmission line towers that runs from Tema to Aboadze in that vicinity. Responding to the issue, Mrs, Ofori said: “We are working with systems that break down all the time. I am not going to say that I know in its entirety what happened and I can vouch for it. But we are working with systems that break down all the time.”
“We as a regulator, it is our responsibility to investigate and know whether it is true or not and take the appropriate actions and that is what we are taking,” she added.
The Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) has served notice that households should expect power cuts over the next few days after it advised PDS to begin the redistribution of power.
This past week marked the fourth time in three years that Ghana has faced near-total grid shutdowns.
Minister of Energy Peter Amewu also assured that power will be normalised by next week.
Aside from these challenges, PDS, which recently took over management of the Electricity Company of Ghana, has assured that it receives enough power to distribute to Ghanaians.
Also allaying load-shedding fears, the Director of Communications at PDS, William Boateng said, “we have enough generation at our end. If we are off, it means that we have announced planned maintenance.”
