Salt Over Injury As ECG Proposes Electricity Tariff Increases

Just when Ghanaians are grappling with the announcement of electricity rationing, “Dumsor”, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has hinted that it need tariffs to be increased so that it can support its operations.

In the over-flogged rationalisation for increasing tariffs, the Managing Director of the company, Kwame Agyeman-Budu at a public forum on Thursday, April 8, 2021, said he is aware that the proposal will need approval from the Public Utilities and Regulatory Commission (PURC), but he believes that it was critical for ECG to have access to more funds to enable it operate efficiently.

Currently, lifeline consumers who are classified as poor and low-income earners pay GHS16 for the power consumed and extra GHS2.13 as service charge, making it a total of about GHS18.

“We need money to do it [improve]. If we get the increase we will love it [but] that will be up to the PURC because, no matter what we propose, they will ultimately decide,” Mr. Agyeman-Budu stated.

“In terms of distribution, we need support, because we have to do upgrades to make sure the system is sustainable. We don’t wait till something is broken before we fix it. We need additional funds to upgrade our systems at all times.” 

Recently, power distributors and the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) announced schedules for power interruptions for alleged maintenance of transmission lines and power stations. 

The government had earlier denied that there was going to be power interruptions or what is locally termed dumsor. However, it has become apparent that this round of power outages is likely to last till the end of this year.

The country started experiencing a heightened erratic power supply since February 2021, but it took the government more than one month to finally admit the problem officially.

Utterances from the Energy Minister, Dr. Mathew Opoku Prempeh is doing little to ease anxiety among consumers, he said the situation is inevitable.

“The power system has experienced supply interruptions for various reasons such as feeder outages at Kumasi due to the conservative dispatch of the Bui Unit, intermittent transmission trips, gas, and fuel-related outages among others including the system collapse that occurred on 7th March that affected the whole country,” he said.

“We should recognize the fact that if most of our generators are on gas and gas is supplied by a dedicated pipeline, a fault at the gas source will realistically affect more generators that previously when everybody had their own gas tank they were relying on,” he said at a forum in Accra.

The government is claiming the outages are due to maintenance, but critics and industry insiders are alleging that the government has been forced to ration power because it is just too broke to pay off debts it owes to independent power producers.