Former Member of Parliament for Ayensuano, Samuel Ayeh-Paye, has reiterated that Ghana is not experiencing intermittent power cuts, commonly known as ‘dumsor’.
According to him, the recent power outages are due to technical challenges rather than a systemic issue of intermittent power cuts.
Power cuts in past weeks have intensified, prompting calls for the power distributor to publish a load-shedding schedule to help citizens plan their lives.
Such calls attracted the anger of the Minister of Energy, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh who told persons advocating for a schedule to publish their own schedule if they so desired.
Despite widespread outages plaguing homes and businesses, the former Ayensuano MP argued that Ghana has sufficient installed capacity to meet power demand but faces technical challenges hindering its full utilization.
“We are having some power outages and according to the power agencies, they are saying that there is no ‘dumsor’ but technical challenges. ‘Dumsor’ happens when you don’t have enough power to produce or supply the exact peak demand that we need.
“As we speak, our peak production is around 3,600 megawatts, and what we get is a little below that and we have a shortfall, and what they [the power agencies] are saying is that the shortfall is not as a result of not having an installed capacity. The calculation is having about 5,000 plus installed capacity.”
Contrary to claims of financial constraints affecting fuel procurement for power plants, Ayeh-Paye stated that the Energy Ministry has assured that funding is not the primary issue.
“What the [Energy] Ministry is telling us is that the issue is not about us not having money to buy fuel, the issue is about some of the plants being under maintenance and repairs and the ECG is also telling us that they have challenges with their transformers.”
The sentiment among many power consumers is that Ghana is currently grappling with severe power outages reminiscent of the era that coined the term ‘dumsor’ several years ago.
However, the national power distributor, ECG, insists that the company is not undertaking any load shedding that requires a timetable.