A leading energy think tank has urged Ghanaians and sector authorities to resist calls for formalised load-shedding timetables, warning that introducing schedules at this stage would institutionalise a crisis that should instead be resolved through urgent structural reform, particularly the introduction of robust redundancy across critical power infrastructure.
The Africa Sustainable Energy Centre (ASEC) issued the call as power outages have intensified following the April 23 fire at the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) substation at Akosombo, which knocked close to 1,000 megawatts off the national grid and triggered widespread disruptions across multiple regions.
The Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) had separately demanded a transparent load-shedding timetable, arguing that inconsistent communication about outages had compounded public frustration. ASEC’s position directly counters that call, arguing the focus must shift to eliminating the conditions that produce outages rather than managing them more predictably.
“The current situation is not one that should be managed with timetables, but one that must be resolved at its root,” said Ing. Justice Ohene-Akoto, Executive Director of ASEC. “This is not the time to institutionalise outages; it is the time to strengthen the system, especially through robust redundancy that prevents failures from escalating.”
ASEC said the ongoing disruptions do not stem primarily from inadequate generation capacity, but from gaps in operational planning and execution within the transmission and distribution segments. The Centre identified the absence of sufficient redundancy in critical infrastructure as a core vulnerability, leaving the national grid exposed to cascading failures whenever a single fault occurs or maintenance activities are underway.
The Centre placed particular responsibility on the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) as the main interface with consumers, calling on it to ensure that all technical interventions, including current retrofit works, are executed with built-in redundancy to maintain continuous supply. ASEC recommended that ECG pause ongoing retrofit activities to first restore system stability, and that redundancy be immediately integrated into all critical systems to eliminate single points of failure.
The call for systemic reform from ASEC is consistent with the think tank’s earlier position, in which it warned that ECG is currently losing up to 32 percent of all power it distributes, the highest rate in more than two decades, and that settling inherited debts without fixing the underlying system will only produce another cycle of disruptions and tariff increases.
ASEC further urged GRIDCo and the Ministry of Energy and Green Transition to strengthen coordination and make redundancy planning a standard requirement across all operations and infrastructure upgrades. The Centre reaffirmed its commitment to supporting the energy sector through research, policy advocacy, and technical expertise.
