Tema, June 10, GNA – Mr Stephen Debrah, the Dispatch Operations Manager at GRIDCo says Accra’s demand for 800 megawatts of electricity exceeds the 470 megawatts demand of Togo and Benin put together.
Accra as a big load centre was demanding more than 23 per cent of the total 3400 megawatts that the nation required, Mr Debrah disclosed.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Debrah said that GRIDCo used to have an evacuation problem, transmitting bulk power from the Tema generation hub to the Accra load centre.
However, since the last quarter of last year, the company, with help from the government had changed all three conductors running between Tema and Accra.
The upgrade, he said, has made it easy for GRIDCo to transmit bulk electricity to Accra.
“The system has been stable this year. We don’t have a lot of interruptions but last year around this time, there were these problems almost every weekend; some intermittent power outages. Our engineers would inform you that Tema here is a generation hub and then Accra is a very big load centre. In fact, Accra alone, the demand in Accra alone is more than Togo and Benin totally put together”, he disclosed.
The high demand for electricity in Accra, Mr Stephen Debrah said has a direct relationship with industrialisation, explaining that the high electricity consumption in Ghana means fast economic growth.
He said the company’s assessment of the high electricity formed the basis for GRIDCo to upgrade its transmission infrastructure between the generation hub and the load centre to support current economic activities, and also in the near future.
“This is the readiness to support the demand growth in the national capital. We are even continuing from Accra towards Cape Coast. We have commissioned brand new substations in the national capital. H.E the Vice President just commissioned one such substation at Kasoa last week,” he disclosed.
While Ghana currently has installed electric power capacity in excess of 5200mw, the total demand is just around 3400mw, leaving room for sufficient reserve, to quickly replace other power plants when there is a fault.
He again, disclosed that almost all thermal plants of GRIDCo are being fired with litmus gas from the Western region, replacing the liquid fuel from the past.
“Gas is cleaner than the liquid fuel and so the power plants when they are running on gas, they run more quietly, more efficiently and the output is also higher than liquid fuel and so relatively we have a more stable kind of power system. The transmission grid is robust and very strong and we don’t have any challenges with evacuating electricity from the power generation stations to the load centres. So, from last the quarter of last year, the power system has been relatively very safe”, he said.
GNA