Seven regions out of sixteen in the country are expected to experience 12-days of load-shedding known in the local parlance as ‘Dumsor’ starting today March 30, 2019, MyNewsGh. com has gathered.
According to sources, the Greater Accra, Central , Western, Eastern, Ashanti, Tema and Volta Regions are the affected areas following a 300MW loss of power as a result of the shutdown of Atuabo Gas Processing Plant for mandatory maintenance
The valve of Atuabo Gas Processing plant in the Western Region was closed at 09.25h today Saturday March 30 for a 12-day outage to complete the final tie-in works under the Takoradi-Tema Interconnection Project.
As a result of the termination of gas flow from the west, the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) has requested a total load reduction of 300MW from 08:00hrs to 18:00hrs.
Former Deputy Minister of Power and Member of Parliament for Yapei-Kusawgu Constituency, John Abdulai Jinapor on his Facebook post on Saturday dropped a hint about the impending load-shedding.
This was in furtherance to an earlier call on government to be candid in explaining the reasons for the recent power outages.
He says all explanations provided by the government so far are palpably false as the blackouts recently experienced across the country is due to a huge financial burden in the energy sector.
“Because you don’t have money, today when we are experiencing ‘dumsor’, you tell us that the very work that has been halted is responsible for the load shedding. It doesn’t make sense.”
“There are persistent power outages because we are not paying for the power we consume. We are running huge losses. Let us take a holistic approach and concede that there are serious financial issues and let’s all come together to see how we can resolve these challenges. We can’t continue to blame this problem on tripping. If you knew you were going to do an upgrade and it is going to affect transmission, it would have been proper to issue a schedule ahead of time. This is an attempt to deceive the people of Ghana. They are having a major challenge and this government should agree, concede and let’s help resolve the challenge”, he added.
