Member of parliament’s mines and energy committee, Edawrd Bawa, has cautioned energy minister, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh against using PR to run the affairs of the ministry.
According to him, the energy minister’s assertion that the availability of power in the country will be determined by timeliness in payment to WAPCo is the least of Ghana’s worries.
He revealed that government should rather be worried about not just for the transportation of gas, which is just a small amount of the components that is needed to ensure there’s power availability.
Mr Bawa indicated that currently in terms of total indebtedness in power that the country has consumed, Ghana is inching close to some GHC15 billion. As such, he noted that WAPCo is simply “the one that picks the gas and brings”.
“… The rot in which we are seated in, I am not scared about whoever is going to contest for the NPP in this. It’s about what we discover when we come into power. The rot that we have seen, it looks like a sore that is dried up on the front, but the rot is under and that is the sort of problem that we are going to get. So, the minister should stop using PR to run that particular sector.”
Edward Bawa
Ghana’s power generation mix
Elaborating on the scope of issues within the energy sector, Mr Bawa stated that the second concern has to do with the energy capacity of the country.
He explained that from the beginning of the year till date, Ghana’s dependable capacity is now 3,407MW, meanwhile at peak, the country is consuming in the region of 3,561MW.
“As of Wednesday, 8:55pm, we did not have enough power to give to Ghanaians. So, when you see that there are sections of the country going off between 6pm and 10pm, it’s because from the beginning of the year up until now, we have a power generation deficit, not only because of gas but just simply because we do not have enough power.”
Edward Bawa
Considering the true situation on the ground, Mr Bawa urged the energy minister to be candid and not create the impression which seems to suggest that power outages in the country are due to trivia reason.
With this, he highlighted that the previous administration warned government on the issue, but the latter moved on the tangent of excess capacity, hence, refused to put in contingency measures to ensure optimum generation capacity.
“As I speak, our growth rate in terms of power consumption is so high – we are doing around 12% annually and we do not have corresponding addition in terms of that. That is why for about eleven months now we have had deficit in term of generation.
“So, when you see your lights off in your area, it is not a localized one, it’s just that because of the lack of transparency of this government, they will not allow GRIDCo to publish a loadshedding plan for Ghanaians. The moment they do that, then their rhetoric, like what the minister is saying, cannot hold. So, they’ll bully GRIDCo not to do that, but currently, we have a huge problem.”
Edward Bawa
Prior to this, Mr Bawa revealed that if the NPP government had continued with the plan of the NDC to ensure that all Ghanaians have access to electricity by 2020, rapidly complete the upgrade of the necessary infrastructure to enable power export and make electricity available to VALCo to run at full capacity, the country would not have been discussing the issue of excess capacity.
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