The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) also said it could not accept responsibility for Thursday’s power outage in some parts of the country.
On October 26, Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) said in a statement that the power outage was due to limited gas supply to Tema, resulting in a shortage of 550MW during peak hours.
The shortage caused a power outage that Thursday night. GRIDCo has since apologized for the inconvenience.
Subsequently, on Saturday, October 28, ECG and GRIDCo announced in a joint statement that power restoration had been successful as a result of the resumption of gas supply from Takoradi to the Tema power station.
However, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), which receives gas from the West African Gas Pipeline Company for subsequent supply to power plants, absolved itself of responsibility for last Thursday’s power supply issue.
In a press statement issued on Monday, October 30, GNPC said that some “misinformed individuals claiming to be energy analysts” were blaming GNPC for the power outages. .
The state oil company said some analysts had alleged that the incident was caused by the company’s failure to pay a debt owed to West Africa Gas Pipeline Company Limited (WAPCO).
It explained that ECG pays for the gas transported directly or otherwise to WAPCO.
“The gas is transported to Independent Power Producers (IPPS) to generate electricity and ECG distributes it as electricity to consumers.Finally, all the money received by ECG after the sale of electricity, directly or indirectly, is downstream of the value chain, including WAPCO. ”
“Traditionally, ECG pays gas transportation bills through the Cash Waterfall Mechanism (CWM). However, the funds received by GNPC from ECG are not sufficient to pay WAPCO’s bills, especially in recent times. was.
However, ECG Managing Director, Dubik Mahama, while speaking on PM Express on Monday, October 30, said the press release was unnecessary and expressed disappointment with GNPC’s handling of the issue. .
“What I know is that in the value chain, we all have to work together. [GNPC] “This is sad because it wasn’t what I expected, because I felt like the issue had been resolved and everyone was moving forward, and neither GRIDco nor we have issued a statement to that effect. So it was neither here nor there, and I think, ‘I don’t even know why there was a need to make a statement in the first place,’ he claimed.
However, that being said, we use something called a Cache Waterfall Mechanism (CWM) when distributing resources based on the collections we create in a month. A new cache waterfall is provided for tier 1 and tier 2. So tier 1 is IPP and for the last 4 months ECG has been making payments to IPP and ECG has not failed and has always continued with IPP and I can confirm to all IPP . ” he pointed out.
He said when WAPCO shut down GNPC earlier this year, it was ECG that stepped in to make payments to restore WAPCO’s supply without making a public announcement.
“Conversation regarding WAPCo and GNPC, this is not the first time ECG has had to step in and bail out GNPC. Legally, ECG has no contract with WAPCO, so CWM is a thought-provoking approach to ensure that you have something available on a monthly, weekly, or bi-weekly basis to pay these bills. What’s sad about this press release is that when this issue happens “They don’t mention what the EKG did for them,” he asserted.
When asked if he thought the power outage was due to electrocardiograms, he replied: “To be honest, I don’t think so, because if we agreed that legally it’s not our responsibility, what are we going to do?”But we agreed to CWM because now They wanted a fair share of the funds ECG collects each month.
“When WAPCO was writing documents, WAPCO never wrote to ECG. ECG sells electricity. We don’t even know the quality of gas etc. Ours is electricity Every PPA that we sign, when we agree on a price to the cent, includes a fuel component. Now we’re supplying them with gas from our fields, so Fuel is always a pass-through, so this whole conversation has nothing to do with gas availability, but more to do with the transport of said gas from the western corridor to the eastern corridor, and vice versa. It’s a flow and that’s why we are where we are. ”
Mahama ECG is currently experiencing a decline in its revenue. This is because electricity purchases are usually lower during the rainy season and it is difficult to raise enough funds to meet final obligations.
“Electricity sales are seasonal, there is downtime, and downtime is when the weather is cold,” he pointed out.
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