Energy expert, Dr Yussif Sulemana, has stated that Ghana’s power transmitter GRIDCo needs to be transparent with the general public and industry players in the energy sector.
This comes on the back of the recent visit the minister made to the company to address the issue of power outages in the country.
In an interview with GhanaWebs’ Amos Ekow Coffie, Dr Yussif stressed that finances may not seem to be the problem but the company must be real with issues and be transparent.
“We a potential generation capacity of closer to 5000 megawatts and our pick demand barely reaches 3000 megawatts and so ordinarily one should be expected that we would be able to supply the power to the competitive user. Despite the fact that we have this excess generation capacity, power is still not readily affordable and now the availability is also threatened and these are key to the security of power supply to household, to industry. We need to guarantee the availability of power, the dependability of power and then we need to guarantee the affordability of power and so the situation gets even worse if power is not dependable,” he said.
He further stated that to power affordability there is the need to bridge the dependability gap before the country thinks about affordability.
He said the retooling of the company and its operations is needed but will also demand some extra cost.
“Just walk step backwards and you end up seeing the issue of finance. First of all, why do we have an issue with obsolete equipment? We have an issue of obsolete equipment because we don’t have proper maintenance or probably due to the fact that we haven’t retooled them and everything will come back to finance as a matter of fact,” he added.
