Power crisis :  Ghana has only 1MW power reserve, dumsor imminent

‘As at yesterday (April 19), peak demand was 2014 megawatts, peak supply was 2013 megawatts. What it means is that demand is almost equal to supply so in case of any other thing we would have to come back to dumsor’, the Head of Policy Unit and Energy Policy Advisor at the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) Ishmael Ackah blurted out.

This comes a day after President John Mahama conceded the country has not yet overcome a more than three year old debilitating power crisis.

Power supply to domestic and commercial users has improved over the last four months but there are fears the country might soon be plunged into another round of load shedding due to challenges with getting fuel (gas) to power some thermal plants in Tema and the western region.

According to ACEP , loadshedding (Dumsor)can only be said to be over when supply meets demand and we have about 25% reserve.

Ishmeal Ackah recounted that ,‘We told you dumsor was not yet over but we are hopeful the situation will improve when gas supply from the FPSO resume’

But President Mahama during his state of the nation address said his government had overcome the four-year old crisis following a fairly stable power supply since beginning of year.

In a seeming Uturn on government early position President Mahama has admitted that Ghana is still facing some energy challenges after weeks of complaints from some residential users of intermittent power cuts.

Addressing a meeting of the Council of State, he stated that: “Our energy challenges are not over but at least for now, we have been able to fix the problem, we are able to match demand and supply, even though we are living dangerously because our redundancy is small, not because we don’t have the generating capacity but because several of our generating assets are gas-based. We are not able to get enough gas to feed them,”

“For instance if you take the eastern generating area which is Tema, we have almost 600MW of gas-based generation but are not getting gas through the West African Gas pipeline to be able to run them. One reason is because Nigeria’s demand for gas is increasing and there is regular destruction of the gas infrastructure and so we get a certain volume today, tomorrow it drops so you cannot predict how you are running those assets,” he concluded.